My Wide Margins

(The first time I read Henry David Thoreau’s statement – “I require wide margins in life” – I knew exactly what he was expressing. That statement went right to my heart and has lived there for many decades.)


I have been on this earth 50 years, and in North-central Florida's Levy County for the past five. This is the first place I have genuinely felt like calling home. Situated along the lower Suwannee River, this is a land wild, wooded, and beautiful. Only in the woods do I feel completely at ease. In the city, pavement and stoplights and buildings—people and all their noises—intrude upon the wide margins my soul requires to thrive.

Levy’s margins enclose fifteen-hundred square miles. Several geographic areas share its boundaries. My favorite is the section cut by the swift current of the Suwannee. I love the scrub forests rolling across small hills in the east, the western tidal flats, and the wetlands that run throughout. I love the scents thrown off by the many pine groves, the sights and sounds of cattle grazing leisurely in wooded pasturelands, the slight salty smell on the coast.

This land is not too much peopled—each square mile holds about 31 humans. My home is hidden in upland forest, an oak hammock two miles from the river. I share the land with deer, armadillos, gray fox, raccoons, striped and spotted skunks, and wild hogs. I have twice seen a panther cross the road by my house. Lizards, skinks, scorpions, rattlesnake, and coral snake work these soils. The gopher tortoise digs underground tunnels to house its young. Alligators live at the river’s edge, and cold weather brings the manatee into our springs. Turkey, eagles, hawks, kites, owls, woodpeckers, cardinals, kingfishers, herons, wood storks, waxwings, dove, and quail roost here. As does the peculiar love bug, an insect that mates and then flies its short life united. Butterflies of many colors flit through, along with mosquitoes, dragonflies, and palmetto bugs. There are more spiders here, I think, than any other place. They create sticky, thick mats of webs across tree branches, under the eaves of my house, around anything left stationary for more than a day.
I have never counted the trees on my five acres, but they are so thick I cannot see from my porch the white lime-rock road that brings visitors to my door and takes me to city five days each week. Most of the trees here stay green all winter. Years of fallen leaves form a thick spongy ground cover, and when I walk the trails in soft shoes, a sweet pungent odor lets off.

When visitors ask me the species of a tree, I say they are bodhi--even though there are many types: long-leaf pine, southern magnolia, hickory, dogwood, sycamore, several varieties of oak, the occasional cabbage palm. I call them bodhi because it was under the bodhi tree that the Buddha found enlightenment. It is surely these trees in this wild and wonderful setting that will lead me to enlightenment, if such a thing is really possible in a human life.

I invite enlightenment to me as I settle down within all this nature. I seem to lose it each day as I go to the city for work, and yet it is work that allows me this place, work that gives the peace and solitude here so much more meaning. I know I need a certain balance to reach enlightenment as surely as I know it is balance we humans must achieve to continue as a community, a nation, a civilization.

Sometimes my life becomes unbalanced. When the needs of work crowd my home life, when political machinations make me fear for the future, when my own consumptive desires overwhelm my reach, I become misshapen, a thing ugly and blighted. I must achieve balance, if only to bring a sliver of hope to my own sphere of influence. I know when I join this sense of hope with others, we will cast a light for others to see by.

I am in the second half of my life, and I am driven by a strong sense of responsibility. The soul of a caretaker or a teacher lives within me, wanting engagement with the outer world.

Sometimes my woods hide me from a truth—a truth of a world where too many have no homes, no hope, no peace, where too many know nothing but hunger and hardship and need. I only hope that I can take my one small shard of enlightenment and spread it beyond my own narrow borders and out into the larger world beyond.