Where the Wild Ones Sleep
I stepped into the woods on the north side of our property one afternoon in early spring. There's something different about that patch of land, a stillness that clings to the trees like a shawl. The sun rarely kisses the ground there in winter, and even now, a chill holds steady, a quiet constancy.
It was a local author and our neighbor, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who led me there, through the pages of her book Growing Old: Notes on Aging with Something Like Grace. She writes of bears and foxes, of how they choose a northern exposure to hibernate, drawn by its reliability. While southern slopes may tempt with fleeting warmth, it is the north, cool and consistent, that calls them home for the long sleep. She goes on to say that she chose such a spot for her own resting place, a family gravesite tucked into a north-facing hillside. Not for sentimentality, but for the company. She imagines the bears and foxes there, bedding down beside her, forming a circle of kinship, one not of blood, but of belonging.
It struck me, this notion of a resting place, not removed from nature but gently folded into it. As I walked among the trees in Spring, I found myself thinking about the spaces we choose, in life and in death, and what they say about how we wish to belong. The north slope isn't the most inviting at first glance, no golden rays slanting through leaves, no gentle melt of snow, but it holds something deeper. It holds memory. It holds the quiet breathing of creatures we rarely see, but somehow sense. The bears were stirring then, moving between the distant trees as they left the dens that carried them through winter.
David Bowie once said that aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been. There's comfort in that, I think. That each softened edge, each line drawn across our face, each step into the woods brings us closer to who we've always been becoming.
Perhaps that's the gift of growing older, not to chase light, but to find peace in the shadowed places. To rest, not apart from nature, but within it, in the same circle of kinship Thomas imagined for herself, bears and foxes bedding down close by, keeping her company through the long sleep.
Growing Old: Notes on Aging with Something Like Grace is a book I recommend, particularly if you find yourself in that season of life when aging begins to feel less like something happening to you and more like an invitation to explore what comes next.
