Page 120 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

I was startled out of this reverie when a baby squirrel ran towards me, chirping and running fast. She

skittered straight towards my lap, then veered up one of the twin sequoias, turned, looked at me, then

skittered across to a nearby tree. There she stopped and turned and looked straight at me. My teacher

had urged us to pay attention to the wild to animals who came towards us. I sat up. The baby squirrel

stayed still as a statue, and looked at me searchingly.

And I understood then, all in a moment, and irrevocably. She was expressing gratitude. She was

thanking me for burying her kin.

The squirrel was urgent with it. Gratitude. This was, I suddenly saw, an essential currency of all the

beings in this forest. Gratitude–it is abundant, urgent, and necessary as breath. I sat back and looked at

the baby squirrel, precisely like the one I pulled from the road just an hour before.

You’re welcome, I whispered.

The squirrel sat with me for a time before skittering on. I stayed nestled within the two sequoias for an

hour or more, listening to the songs and birdcalls of the forest.

Deep mounds of snow covered much of the ground along the banks of the Kauah River where I walked

later that afternoon. White-­‐blue waters roared down from white-­‐capped mountains of the Sierras. The

river was full with recent rains, everything pulsing with the giddy sense of spring. I settled on a dry spot

under a tree, and sat by the river. Eyes closed, I set my head down on my backpack to rest and dream. I

offered prayers for my family and for the other women on the Medicine Walk. I sat in silence with the

river, who frothed and tumbled like a wild thing. Inside I was at ease. I had touched something quiet at

the base of my heart.

Then, impossibly, it happened again. A baby squirrel startled me, skittering towards my lap, chirping

and squawking. Then he scurried up a nearby tree. Only ten feet away, he turned and looked directly