Instinct, Intuition, and Imagination

(or Channel Like an Animal)

[random musings for a chapter in my book The Body of My Mother that is trying to take shape but is not yet fully formed. Thank you for your patience.]

A family of beavers has moved into the pond across the street from my home. At first, I thought a pile of debris was collecting in the middle of the water but slowly the domed form of a lodge began to take shape. Each morning on my walk I would discover it had grown, during the night, a little bigger.  One branch jutting out from the top sprouted leaves this spring, like a flag on a suburban home, announcing our new neighbors’ affiliation with the forest itself.

In the darkest murkiest corners of the pond the beavers are, stereotypically, hard at work. Trees and saplings have been felled, leaving behind jagged stumps I have to be careful not to trip over any of one of them and risk impaling myself on another. Some trunks have only been briefly gnawed, while others have been whittled down to precarious points but still, somehow, remain standing. I cannot seem to discern the reason why some trees are immediately brought down while others are left as strange wetland sculptures, as if I had stumbled into some installation by a modern artist, Andrew Goldsworthy, say, who creates beautiful ephemera from stones and sticks, wind and water, petals and fallen leaves.