“What matters most?” is a question I ask myself frequently, as I choose and rearrange priorities for how to spend my time, daily, hour by hour. Even minute by minute. It has taken sixty years for me to recognize this question’s power and necessity in my life. And I’m only just beginning to see how slippery its answers can be.
The green snake was what mattered most one hot September afternoon. What you don’t see here are all the videos I took of him (or her) moving along the top of a rusty wire mesh fence between the backyard and the pasture, swaying and flexing a neon-green muscle of a body into an unusual number of curves while moving along the top of the thin wire. I only see this kind of snake in our yard once or twice a year. Every time seems like the first and makes me feel lucky. I could not read the creature’s eyes to figure out what mattered most to him (or her), but I was hoping that by keeping my distance, the answer wasn’t “avoiding me.”
After a super-dry late summer, one deluge of a couple inches brought a brief respite in late September, inspiring the autumn crocuses to bloom like crazy. They are actually in the narcissus tribe and not a crocus at all, but regardless of their name, they mattered most when I saw a small bumble bee buzzing and pushing into a bloom. I remembered Betsy B., the woman who first gave me those bulbs nearly thirty years ago. She dug them up for me because she was moving far away from the perennials she’d planted over her years in Virginia. Giving them to me was a way to hold onto them, I think. They mattered on this September day because they were flowering when very little else was.
And then came the rain, nearly 7 inches over a few days, which quenched the thirsty forest floor. It came from the edges of the hurricane that caused untold destruction and death in North Carolina. Choosing to notice what was near rather than worry about what I could not touch was difficult. So when the fungus flowers began to bloom in the lawn and the woods, they mattered most.
The challenge of trying to use “what matters most” as a guide to my priorities is especially pronounced in Autumn, when the truth that change is the only constant becomes so visible in the world. Getting myself out on my bike to take care of my body is what had mattered most one day, and because I followed that lead, I encountered up-close beauty I never would have seen from the window of my car the next day: a rose-colored, new fallen oak leaf and the white-edged, perfect pine cones that had been brought down the night before, all at once. The photo here doesn’t capture just how many pine cones there were. I pedaled home to get a bag and then rode back out to gather them, since picking them up so they wouldn’t get smashed was what mattered–and being able to give them to my friends who don’t live along a road through the woods.
Sometimes why something matters is too deep for words, and definitely much larger than can be handled by the part of me that thrives on explanations. Like the glorious red of the Sourwood leaves’ death show, which stopped me as I walked across the pasture this morning. What mattered most just before that moment was freshening the goats’ water buckets, but then what mattered was to get closer to that tree.
I guess what it amounts to is paying attention to intention. What matters most is a guide that helps me choose the action most needed in my here and now, especially when that action is not necessarily what’s right in front of me to do. Clarity seems to be the message beaming in through the angled light of October’s low-slung sun, in this ongoing dry weather during these fast-shortening days. So much of what I walk through daily is intensely beautiful, like the light on Melody Creek that seems to make the entire forest matter in ways I won’t live long enough to fathom.
What matters most to me at the moment is putting this entry in my website, even though the photos don’t do the content justice and the post may never be seen. Which brings me to this conclusion: my attempt to prioritize my focus and choose my actions on “what matters most” in the heres and nows of my days doesn’t lead to choices bounded by notions of outcome, consequence, or what humans call reason. It does, however, require that I not second guess myself. It does mean trusting in the unseen ripples joining every single life as it is lived. Maybe it’s rooted in a kind of faith, though I’m not sure in what.