Spelunking

*Front of house and the rolling hills of ivy, not.*

So there I am, minding my own business, looking at the embankment just outside my front door. I’ve been living here almost three years, and the ivy, salal and Oregon Grape have certainly had their way with the front “yard.” They seem a befitting counterpart to the 14 gigantor fir trees under which they sprawl.

And then I had a thought:

“Huh. What am I looking at?”

So I went spelunking, and this is what I found. Not mounds of ivy out there, but a terrace of big-ass rocks! But wait. There’s more! It’s not a single level. The terrace has two tiers. It’s as if I found a room in my house that I had no idea existed.

There is a thrill to finding a treasure, something Macy’s knows full well, hooking generations of shoppers who love the exhilaration of finding a great deal. However, there is nothing that compares to finding hidden treasure in your own back yard, particularly when you have been deafly looking at it for years.

When I was a child there was a house a block away from where I lived. I walked by it on my way to school. One day, as if a veil had been lifted, my friends and I saw a small playhouse, just standing there in plain view, not 20 feet from the sidewalk. It clearly had been there for years, begging the question of why we had never seen it. However as children that was not the puzzlement:

“Where did that come from?”

What is it that turns the kaleidoscope of the mind; and what finally snaps chaos into a recognizable pattern? How is it one day the pieces suddenly fall into place and we see, or perhaps simply allow, a reality previously unknown?

As children we never considered the playhouse was on someone’s else’s property and set about to restore it to it’s former glory. School couldn’t go by fast enough as I waited for class to be over so I could meet my friends, brooms, mops and trash bags in hand.

It had two rooms, complete with interior doors, a mind blowing detail to 10 year old children. Several windows frames completed the little house along with a gabled roof. As we cleaned and cleared the accumulation of branches and dirt off the floor, we made plans for chairs and a table.

About a week into our project the local newspaper got wind of our efforts. They contacted the owners with a proposal to do a feel-good story on this playhouse reclamation project spearhead by children.

The owners, fearing vandals, opposed the story and then boarded up the house. That was the end of our treasure and an awful lesson in the ways of fear.

In hindsight I now recognize all kinds of tell tale signs that let me know I was not accurately perceiving my front yard. Ferns “randomly” planted that actually indicate the 2nd terrace. Shovels that refused to go into the ground, creating that clinking sound of metal on rock. And oh yeah, an old photo of the house, that duh, shows them. Yet somehow I couldn’t believe they were still out there until I “found” them. Like, maybe they had composted, Theresa?

While proving Newton’s 1st law, snapping ivy roots and flinging backwards down the hill, and gleefully peeling back five-inch layers of sod and roots to reveal another amazing rock, the question for me this time around was how? How did I not see what is so obvious? That’s what 30 years of yoga training will do for you.

Which takes me to my next, constant, existential question: what does it take to change a mind? Why do some possess the ability, and others seemingly not? As an educator I can say it’s not simply knowledge. On the surface our minds seem the most fluid aspect of our being and posses the greatest potential for change. So why is it so damn hard for us to update them?

See below for excavation photos and big rocks!

After spraying it with "Ivy, Be Gone!" If only. More like tools and triceps.

More "before," starting to come around the side.

Hmmm. Are those big rocks from this photo taken a long time ago still possibly there?

The Voice of God

Theresa Elliott