Big questions, profound and eternal, come to the fore these days. They’re questions that won’t be answered by any election, nor by what follows. They come—partial and suggestive—in whispers, the kind of whispers one can hear only in stillness. They’re the questions one may hear best in November, when the year’s fecundity has subsided, and with it the distracting noise of a life too busy with false urgency.
This morning my daily readings brought me to this, by Hal Borland. “Those who would look for simple answers to the big questions should go for a country walk on a November afternoon, out where the fundamental shape of the hills is now revealed. Feel the earth underfoot. See the sky overhead. Listen to your own pulse, rhythmic as the tides. There are the answers, for those who will feel, and see, and listen” (Twelve Moons of the Year [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979] Nov. 11, abbreviated).
Of all the months of the year, November is my favorite. Now I find rest, and peace, and the lure of something greater than the splash of today’s news. John Masefield wrote that he “must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky” (“Sea-Fever,” 1917). Now I must go out to the lonely fields, where cockle burrs and beggar lice cling to me in ways the mundane events of today never could. I must walk under open skies, where perspective expands far beyond this present moment. Where I’m reminded (Masefield again) that “all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, / And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.”
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