On Light and the Good Clean Earth

This is one of the brand-new windows punched out of a room long buried in the earth. It sits under our deck on the ground floor facing the lake. Before now, sleeping in this room always felt like sleeping in your tomb, filed away in your crypt under C for Cold-and-Dead. Now suddenly the view-spoiling posts under the deck are gone, as are the outside stairs. Now, light streams in all around. Our friend and contractor Paul scooped away tons of earth back in May and last month made three pretty windows in this wall once buried. One fine day he'll paint, and lay a warm and breathing floor of wood.This bedroom sits just below our own room, which is so filled with sun- and moonlight I sometimes wake nights and think I'm sailing the heavens. And yet I'm so drawn to this new space I keep going downstairs to stand in it where I feel like part of a mole family tucked in under a tree-root and peeking up at starlight.Because roots are beautiful, are they not? And the tumble of growing grass? And the innocent pores of earth? Always we're too busy to look down, whether into a hole or a gully or a ditch; too forward-glancing ever to note what's right beneath our feet, holding and supporting us.For two weeks now since I heard of the death of my friend Kevin I have felt my heart as a dank and heavy space. Today for the first time it feels a little better, cheered perhaps by this inside peek. Maybe Walt Whitman was right and to die really is different from what anyone supposes and luckier. He called grass the beautiful uncut hair of graves. I think he definitely knew .... something that I myself am only just starting to sense.

This is what we see through the middle window now.

and this is how it looked back in May.