Marrowbone

A wondering

Photo by Hieu Do Quang on Unsplash

Nature handed me this insight/wondering combination late last September when I attended Marrowbone. If you want to meet Vermont’s soul, Marrowbone is one steeping path in. Held annually in the forested mountains above Lincoln, it’s an event that’s hard to describe. Like the cusp of fall in which it takes place, Marrowbone first surprises then opens you.

Sometimes further than you could even expect.

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

Fall’s cusp

Fall’s cusp is the threshold between summer and fall. This short interseason in Vermont is palpable. It’s still green, though not the thick, Look at how green it is, green of Vermont summer that makes even the most Vermont Vermonter speak its greenness aloud. Instead, the green at this cusp time of year is a color and texture in transformation, a sort of slight de-lushifying, think kelly to olive, though neither of those colors are at all accurate. But in these cusp days, the green begins to mute, and at first, the shift is so quiet a person simply murmurs, The green is changing. It’s so quiet, it’s almost a feeling.

Then the color shift increases in more palpable hints and murmurs, you might even occasionally hear a shout from a person just ahead of you on the sidewalk or forest floor - look at this red leaf! One among the green, signalling change.

Even with that occasional bright red leaf, Fall’s cusp is to the cocoon as fall is to the butterfly. It doesn’t truly reveal what’s being brewed: a future brilliant goldyelloworangecrimson tapestry that, when it emerges, will hurt your teeth, it’s so beautiful.

It’s in this cusp, this threshold midspace, that Marrowbone takes place.

The route to Marrowbone

To get to the spot where Marrowbone takes place, you wind up a two-lane road bordered by Lincoln’s woods along the boulder-strewn New Haven river, pass homes, some centuries-old, and a few equally old stores, cross a narrow bridge, and then continue on, deeper into the mountains. Hand-painted Marrowbone arrows direct you; finally turning you from pavement onto a dirt road, and finally to a hard right up and over a very narrow rutty two-tire track through the woods where, wha-lah, you arrive in a big, grassy, blue-skied field. Ah.

You park amidst more cars than you would expect since it was just you on the road, wasn’t it? Then you check in at a foldy-legged cardboard table set in a sea of grass with a person who pen-ticks you off a paper list. There’s no cell service in the mountains above Lincoln.

Groups leave on the fifteen minute mark, and you are on time – in my case pre-1:15 – because if you miss your specific group’s departure, you’re out of luck. Marrowbone sells out; it sold out weeks ago. It sells out fast. So, you may have believed you were on the road alone, but you most definitely were not.

Even when we don’t see them, our people are always out there.

Checked in, you step over a very low slung rope, walk further into the meadow, and stand loosely with your group until a person - wearing sometimes diaphanous, sometimes artsy, clothing and always carrying a long stick with tinkle bells at the tip - comes to collect you. That person leads you towards the woods, and there, she (in my case) stops at the trees’ border to explain how the experience will unfold.

If you still have them, turn off your phones, she says. We’ll wind down this narrow trail, watch for roots, and when we reach the first clearing, find a place on the forest floor to sit or stand. The actors will begin when we’re ready. No photos, please. Just be. And then she adds, In the interest of the experience, we’re asking you to proceed from this point on in silence. She tells us that she, our guide, will lead us forward and after each performance will use her bells to signal when it’s time to move on. She rings the bells once and we silently follow her into the woods.

Photo by Vidit Goswami on Unsplash

The Event

This is my second time to Marrowbone, so I know what to expect. An up and down walk along a root strewn path through the forest. The journey alone is beauty. Then, seven stops at seven clearings, a short performance at each. The clearings are small, sometimes in woods, sometimes meadow, and each have enough space for the 20 or so of us to reform into an audience and sit or stand. The clearings are scattered far enough apart along the wooded trails that we remain completely unaware of the 1pm group and the 1:30 group. It’s just us and the woods and what is to come.

Awaiting us in each clearing is a small group of people, arranged in a still life tableau. We enter, find seats on moss or leaf duff or stand at a pitch on the forest floor, then we grow even more silent, and the actors begin. What they do is a performance, though that word, like kelly and olive, is not quite right. I can’t really describe what happens in a way that captures how wonderful, how moving, how searing, how not like a performance, at least in a traditional way, each experience in a clearing is. What happens isn’t a cohesive play really, each actor may speak, or play an instrument, or sing; they may perform together or individually or a combination of both. It’s like a quilt of song and word where the squares of fabric weren’t designed together, but side by side, they belong. The parts are incredible, make no mistake, but the sum is so much more.

Each clearing’s performance is different. As we move from one spot to the next, the progression of song and spoken poetry is like a partial story, a conversation unfolding, and though each clearing is independent of the others, together they offer something invisibly twined.

And in the white space of breeze and light, what we hear is twined also to the wholeness of our humanity. All the metaphors: a thread, a door opening, a path ahead. It’s beautiful, contemporary, relevant, moving, and will offer the same opportunity as the cusping leaves around us, transformation.

That day

So, following our guide with the silent bells, we began. Singly and side by side, we walked down the hill along the rooted path, watching both our step and the leaves overhead in an elaborate silent dance of paying attention and letting go, readying ourselves to receive whatever would be offered. We entered the first clearing. Four people awaited us. We sat.

After a sequence of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Ada Limon, and a traditional song from the playing of Peter Sutherland, it was easy to proceed to the next clearance in silence. Everyone honored our guide’s request. It’s probably worth noting that there are people I wouldn’t bring to Marrowbone because they’d think it was weird or they couldn’t be quiet or give themselves over. And there are people I would bring because they’re open, in whatever small or large way, to changing their hearts.

I was with those people on this day.

This day was also my birthday, and there I was, walking through the woods with people I love, people open to being changed by art and beauty and truth and our shared experience. People willing to do something outside of what they were used to. And there I also was, surrounded by people I didn’t know who were open to the same. What a day, right? It felt especially important in such an excruciating time where art and truth and beauty matter not a whit to the severely wounded menbabies and devil barbies running our country and taking over our world.

It’s so easy to feel alone in this time. But, this day suggests to me that perhaps (perhaps?) there’s also some important trusting to be done: that high up in the low mountains, through the woods and down a dirt road, we will find experiences created to bolster us and send us back out into the world.

Marrowbone was there to feed the web of our humanity, to sustain and power and challenge us in the face of this. This is no metaphor. It’s just plain fact. A group of Vermont people had designed an experience to challenge us and fill us up. To give us space to re-center and find the courage that comes from touching our own individual moral cores.

As we walked to the second clearing, I could feel that we’d all shown up for this reason, for the first time or twentieth. we were open to the threshold, and it was good.

Back to the time of this telling and the second clearing

On my birthday of this year, 2025, we settled in the soft leaf-fall of the second clearing. The day was unseasonably warm, which meant the air felt soft and just right, even if it wasn’t, and the leaves gentled overhead like window-ruffled curtains.

The tableau before us was a man with a guitar on his knee, a woman seated next to him as though they were a couple, and another woman a bit further off who felt independent of the first two. We waited for them to begin. The woman on the far right stood and spoke Ilya Kaminsky’s poem, “We Lived Happily During the War.”

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested

but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was

in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month

of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,

our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

She spoke it to us, to the trees, to whatever cusp was there to hear it and cocoon it into another brighter, lighter being. She spoke it to those who listened, to those who didn’t. And though I’ll never know, I hoped that we twenty-five or so strangers sitting in the leaves, listening, had heard. Water table heard. The silence-laden sigh as the poem ended suggested we had. The group was rapt.

Then the man lifted his guitar and began to play. Then the woman by him began to sing. And then he sang, and together they went on, handing the song back and forth to one another. They sang “Dollar,” by I AmRoze. Don’t listen to it yet, but do know I’m going to ask, urge, as close to demand as words on paper can come, that you take your finger and press the link, with your butt planted in the chair so you really hear the song. Deep inside, you hear the song. It’s how we heard it. But for now, please don’t listen to it because we’re at the part that’s hard for me to write, and I need to tell you that first.

Photo by Ben Marler on Unsplash

Watch it unfold with me.

Picture the man lean over his guitar and begin to strum, finding the tune, winding into the song and letting it flow forward before looking to the woman: the cue for her to sing. He plays with quiet passion, and the guitar rocks with him, lifting and settling the carved inward groove of its body that’s created with an arc to fit your leg and hold it steady there as you play. The guitar lifts from his leg and settles, lifts and sets. He plays. In the living silence of the woods, I can feel the resonance of the strumming in the air. And in me.

The music and its vibration must not only affect me because it’s then that the most dramatically spikey-furred, inch-and-a-half-long, yellow, bright yellow, caterpillar begins to climb the guitarist’s jeans, caterpillar bumbling in uncharacteristic swiftness from the ground up to his mid shin. Regardless of how you feel about caterpillars, this is one stunning creature. And it is also determined. In starts and stops, it continues toward his knee, and as the singing begins and the song progresses, it makes good speed. I watch that caterpillar and I watch the man play his guitar and I watch the guitar rock up and down on his thigh, lifting from his leg and coming squarely down again. You can tell where this is headed, can’t you?

The man and the woman sing back and forth, growing in intensity. Then the woman, whose voice over the course of the song grows to fill the woods, sings the song’s refrain. Its heart.

Tell me, why the price of someone else’s life equals my dollar.

Ok, maybe now is the time to listen to the song. Do it. Put yourself in the woods. Close your eyes. Feel feel the shift of nature all around you. Feel the poem you just heard. Feel this song.

Your soul won’t regret it.

See, on the heels of the poem, this song opens us like cans that need opening, so the garbage we’ve traveled with for so long can be revealed and dumped. So we can actually see the world. Our world. How we live in it and the cost of how we live. How my dollar and what it buys me is more important to me than someone else’s life. And how this is shown by how I live, even if I choose to not recognize it.

If you are perhaps a bit puzzled here, ask, What do I do (buy, partake in, etc) that has, or may have, a negative impact on another person, creature, the environment?

That’s the heart of the song: how could I let the value of someone’s life equal the importance of my spending or earning my dollar? How could their life be worth my dollar, how could my dollar be worth more to me?

That song, in the woods, with the literal and metaphorical death of so many things going on just beyond borders, offers us a chance to start again.

And yes. This is all happening as the caterpillar crawls up the man’s leg toward the lifting and planting guitar. The caterpillar start stops start stops its climb up his shin until I realized it is not going to ever permanently stop, or turn back, or even turn sideways to head another direction. That caterpillar is headed up and over the man’s knee toward the resonance that draws us all, toward the place on the man’s leg where the guitar will lift with the strumming and then settle flat in rest, opening a temporary space for the creature from which it will not return.

Oh for goodness sake, I can hear my old college buddy say to me, it was a caterpillar. I can laugh even now, imagining her tone in my mind, and I can shake my head ruefully because, see, I hear her and yet we’re each made the way we’re made, aren’t we?

For me, my buddy’s exact sentence can be said with utterly different intonation and therefore utterly different meaning, It was a caterpillar!

For me, it’s a meaning that in those woods froze my world, while all around me, in the silent rapt rise and fall of the audience’s breathing, I Am Roze’s song went on as well, tugging, tugging, demanding, beseaching. Asking to become a part of us that would not depart. A temporary space from which we would not return the same. From which we would live in the world a new way. A way I want to live.

It seemed no one else saw the caterpillar.

I am only two or three rows back. I am so close I could call out as that caterpillar tops his knee. Look! I could stand and wave my arms. Stop! I could do something to save that caterpillar as it crawls toward the music that calls it, this body-pulsing rhythm of truth and beauty. Every human in the woods that day is feeling the music after all, why not the tiny creature? We are all held in the musicians’ and song’s power. And we’re all one, aren’t we?

I am held, too, but in multiple ways. I am held not only in the music and its meaning, but in the time before the threshold where a person does not get up and wave their hands to stop death, even if they think a caterpillar’s life truly matters. I watch the guitar lift and settle, lift and settle. I am filled with turmoil. And then once, at least as I remember it, the caterpillar crawls in underneath and then back out before the instrument settles, and my breathing ends and begins in that moment as life and death play out before me. I am frozen by the power in my hands. And at my immobility despite it all.

The crowd remains completely held, possessed by the song and its question. I can feel that too. They’re being changed. And no one seems to see the caterpillar except me. And I don’t know what to do.

What should I have done? What would you have done? And yes, I know the two questions are completely independent of one another.

Tell me, why does the price of someone else’s life equal my dollar? Why does the price of someone else’s life equal (for me) protecting the dollar of the people around me?

It was like I was living two experiences. I was deep in the question, the truth of the song that I believed, and I believed that I believed. And it was also the question, the truth, of what the caterpillar was showing me, wasn’t it? Would I pick the value of all these people’s dollar? What the actors and prepared for and earned? What the people around me had paid for? What convention and social norms I’d been raised with were valued at? Or would I pick the life of a small yellow spikey creature who lived full-time where we were temporarily settled?

In the forest, I see who I am. I’m not going to save its life.

Instead, I’m going to sit there and silently root for the caterpillar with all my heart and soul, but I’m not going to do a damn thing that will disrupt the performance in order to save it.

Later I’ll wonder, what have I been taught? At what cost? By taking this teaching into me, what have I lost?

Here are a few things I discovered I’ve been so deeply taught along the way that I didn’t even know they powered my muscles: You respect the artist. You respect the person who has the stage. You don’t disrupt the performance. You don’t ruin other people’s experience. You sit in silence, no matter what you think. People’s experience is worth more than an insect’s life. It’s just a caterpillar.

This is part of what I was taught about keeping the peace. By family, society, culture.

Behave. Be silent. Their dollar is worth more than that caterpillar’s life. The changing of their lives is worth more than the living of one caterpillar’s life. What they can do for the world matters more.

Is that true? If it’s true, is it always true? Who and how am I to decide?

All these last few years, I’ve been working hard, and I thought I was growing my heart and my voice, most especially since I turned 60. I thought I was learning, bit by bit, to speak from the still center of my being. And then? At Marrowbone, which is all about the sanctity of life and our role in it, I chose convention. I actively lived it.

Photo by Melissa De Yoe on Unsplash

Our voices

If it had been a person in danger, I would have cried out. I believe that. And yet, would I?

A few months ago, I read an account by a woman who was in the Salt Lake City airport when she heard screams and crying. A woman was being snatched by ICE. It was the same horrible playbook we’ve been seeing over and over, if we’re watching. Too many rough, over-militarized masked men, one woman crying, yelling that she has legal papers and children. Them ignoring her, dragging her away. People gathered, at best yelling and filming what might be the end of her.

The woman wrote that she herself was screaming, and that as she stepped toward the struggling woman and her violent abductors, the SLC policeman who was standing there and watching the scene unfold turned to her and put his hand on his gun and told her with his eyes and body that if she intervened there’d be hell to pay. She wrote, I stopped. Instead, I pulled out my camera. She posted the video, and in her writing that accompanied it, she cried out, But I didn’t do anything!

Would I have done anything different? Would I even have been as brave as she was? Or would I have watched like I did in the woods?

These are some the questions I’ve been left with.

What does it mean to witness? What does it mean to act? When does the brave and important act of witnessing cease to be completely brave and important, become a second-tier level of bravery mixed with self-protection? Or become not brave at all?

Why have we taught ourselves that our lives matter more than others? And the caterpillar made me ask, why do our lives matter more than the lives of other creatures?

The Soul

So, this is how wondering into the unanswerable question leads me.

My neighbor recently adopted a four-year old male poodle that was rescued from a breeding place. All the dogs lived in cages above a concrete floor. This little poodle had never walked on a leash, never had his paws touch grass, never run after a ball, never learned the beauty of a loving hand. For the first month, my neighbor had to carry it on their walks. It had no idea what to do in the world.

The man who runs the breeding center is a deeply religious man. His explanation for the dog’s treatment is that dogs have no soul. This, it appears, abdicates him from everything except keeping the creatures that create his living alive.

What is a soul?

For the followers of the Bible, when did God putting Adam in charge of the rest of God’s creation mean he could abuse it for his own ends? Where does God say that only humans have a soul. And if God did say that, where does soul versus no soul allow cruelty and abuse? Especially for one’s own dollar?

Doesn’t having a soul come with a real and deep responsibility? I am always suspicious of the word should, but shouldn’t it? And does the answer change whether or not you believe in God or Adam or the snake or the soul or even a hierarchy at all?

What about having a heart?

Why one belief and yet a different action?

This is a time in history where this question is particulary obvious.

How can I believe one thing and do another? In the case of the poodle and the soul, how can someone who says he loves God, which is loving the deepest form of love, cage a bunch of other creatures? Cage and mistreat?

See how this goes beyond a poodle?

How can I say I love love and let a caterpillar get smushed?

This conflict between saying and doing is perhaps the paradox of being human. And, if that’s true, I’ve been left with the question of how can I bring the two closer together?

I know I have to see the truth of my actions in order to grow. Yet an interesting phenomenon is that when I pose or write a wondering that looks me right in the face, and holds me on the spot, I have lovely friends who work hard to get me off the hook. Or at least to give me comfort. A bit of the ‘you didn’t mean’ or ‘you’re a good person’ kind of solace. But, beloved friends, I am ok. I would only not be ok if I wrote this and was busy letting myself off the hook. I have to see myself to move forward. To grow. Just tell me you love me despite rather than let me off the hook.

Is that what we need to do for one another?

I wonder, is protecting one another from our hardest to look at truths also a social teaching? Does it keep the way our culture operates from shifting?

Why is someone else’s life worth my comfort? Why is someone else’s life worth our comfort?

When I look my Marrowbone silence in the face, I am invited to acknowledge the truth that I didn’t speak out of my own self-protection, out of the upholding of societal norms, out of the collective understanding that the experience of the humans around me was more important than the life of that caterpillar. Even when I didn’t agree with my own motivations.

Even as I continue to uncover them, when will I fully understand the myriad ways I’ve been taught and taught and taught to not use my voice to disrupt? When will I be able to navigate around this?

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Muscles?

The way I look at it, that day at Marrowbone was a good start at least. Helluva start. I mean, look. Here I am. Writing to you about a spectacular yellow caterpillar whose life I left to fate. I’m saying it out loud, even though I know that when I next see my buddy, her face will show concern and compassion and she’ll put her arm around me and say, Amy.

But what do you think? Should I have spoken for the caterpillar? Stopped the performance on behalf of its life?

Here’s the truth: I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t know the answer. My answer, anyway.

I should have. Even if I pissed everyone off, even if I’d broken the important spell cast in the clearing two by those three performers, a spell that might have changed the lives of those sitting around me to better seek and act for justice, I should have spoken.

Maybe a different spell would have been cast. Or maybe I just would have ruined stop two. Or the whole experience.

Thing is, I wouldn’t have had this much trouble writing this piece if I thought otherwise. It doesn’t really matter what you think about the value of a caterpillar, does it. Or what I should have done. What matters is what I believe. And what I do as a result.

But here’s the hardest truth: I wouldn’t have had this much trouble writing this piece if I wasn’t also pretty sure I’d be quiet again if it happened in exactly the same way this coming weekend. At this point in my development, I think I’d sit still there in the cusp of the fall forest. I think I’d let the leaves still speak for me. And we know how good most of us are at listening to the message of the leaves.

This life in our human suits is surely humbling.

What does a yellow caterpillar ask of me?

At the end of the second performance, as the woman’s voice filled the rising trees and blue sky above us, asking again and again why we felt the value of our dollar was equal to another person’s life, and as that little caterpillar, having already survived once, crawled around the man’s lower thigh, the man looked down, AT LAST, and saw it. And he smiled.

It didn’t die. (And my neighbor’s poodle is so damn jaunty now, it would thrill your heart.)

Later, when I broached the topic ever so quietly on the car ride home, I learned that no one else saw it. Only I did. Oh Universe, you powerful thing.

So, this time, it is only left only to me to ask myself, Amy, what will it take for you to yell out in the middle of a performance to save a life?

And yes, this is a metaphor. And it isn’t.

There is no full twisting dismount to this wondering. Because I don’t know what I’ll do or who I’ll become. I do know this time is a cusp point for each of us, and what we choose impacts our communities, our country, and our world. This cusp time has us all individually and collectively standing in a threshold that is full of life and full of death. In that threshold, I don’t know if we’re caterpillars, cocoons, or butterflies. Where we individually are in consumption, metamorphosis, flight. I don’t even know if this very overused metaphor works.

I do know that the only question that is right for me to ask is the one I ask of myself.

Disappointment will happen.

But I can hope. And hope, as Solnit writes over and over, is a verb. And a verb is an action. And an action needs a muscle in order to move. And muscles are built one tiny choice at a time. I don’t know how long I’ll have to build my muscles in order to stand up in the middle of a performance given for my peers and disrupt it by bringing it to a stop in order to change something I alone might feel is important.

But the first muscle, the first action, the first step toward it, is to look.

Looking is the first, not the last. It’s only the beginning.

It feels like the right time to say something here about love as our power source, but I think this is a truth you already know.

Photo by Patrick Bigelow on Unsplash