Borrow Pits

Twenty years ago, when I came to the Gulf Coast to retire from the Air Force and build the house of my dreams on the shore of East Bay the natural world was just a backdrop against which the dramas of my life were played out. I was ignorant of the depth and breadth of the word natural in the descriptor, “natural world.” Mindfulness was not in my vocabulary, therefore never on my mind, in those days . I remember watching 16 dump trucks of reddish colored soil fill the three tiers of cinder blocks that were cemented in place to form a 100 year flood insurance policy while serving as the foundation of my new home. I never wondered once where the fill was coming from or at what costs, other than what I was paying for each load. My mindless living continued for the better part of the next10 years. Shortly after I began wading into the waters of the invisible world that supports the visible world I met Trebbe at a Wilderness Guides Council gathering and within a matter of months I was crammed into a SUV headed with her and two others into wilds of Victoria, British Columbia to participate in a vision she had that that had to something to do with “Attending the Earth.” Where we arrived, 40 miles past the end of a paved road, was the boundary between miles of clear cut forest land and an Old Growth preserve. There each day each of us went and sat in the middle of the carnage that forestry creates and watched and felt the pain and anger and sadness wash over and through us, leaving only a magical vibrant landscape all around where we first had only seen death and destruction. When we left there the ache of the goodbye to that beautiful place was so great it remains alive within me to this day. It urges me not to forget the transformative nature of woundedness. So each year I’ve gone into wounded places and consciously opened myself to the earth’s and my own woundings and let what comes of that come. I came away today feeling, almost knowing, that the difference between beautiful and un-beautiful in the natural world is almost imperceptible. 

Additionally, in my case today at the Navarre Borrow Pits it was obvious this one of many such places across Northwest Florida has for hundreds of years attracted Native Americans, train companies, road and highway engineers, land owners and urban developers for the borrowing of the precious, unique red clay with it’s good bearing capacity with little to no shrink-swell properties. great for making pottery and urban development. But all the taking of the earth has left ragged edged, unsightly holes on the forest floor that long ago became disassociated from what we continue to call them—Borrow Pits. There was no evidence today that I could see that anyone that has come to these special places to “borrow” the clay has made any attempt to repay the debt, to pony up for the loan of the original owner. It was easy to see, standing at the edge of the massive pit today, I’m not going to fix it. It struck me that fixing it was not even a good way to be with this wounded place. It felt better just to be there in gratitude and appreciation with eyes to see it was so, not un-beautiful.