Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.
I was learning to live in Nature, shaping my life, my everyday activities in a direct way according to the weather, the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun and moon. I was once again becoming aware of Nature's all-powerful presence. If anyone had asked me, I would still have been unable to say what might be learned from Peter asleep among his animals on the prairie as I had seen him that first summer, but I was learning it. I was learning it slowly, painfully, in solitude and silence and out of my own experience.