“What is that? Slow down!”
We’re driving to the Appalachian Trail section that runs a few miles from our house. It’s a cold, bright December morning after a weekend of rain. A half-mile from home, and Melissa’s scanned something working a deer carcass at the edge of a marshy pond beside the road.
We slow way down, and it looks up, leisurely, from the carcass, and, seeing us, starts to trot off, unhurried, up a short hill through dry winter grass, to the tree line. The sleek form, tufted ears, and thick coat confirm: a Bobcat.
You don’t expect a bobcat in the lower Hudson Valley—they’re notoriously shy, and, even though we know they’re around, they don’t show themselves very often. We’ve been here since 1999, and this is the first we’ve sighted.
It moves with liquid, supernatural grace. Even at a distance of 50 feet, you can see ferine weaves of muscle moving under its winter coat of tawny-gray fur, as the cat, Lynx Rufus, brushes through the grass towards a woodpile.
Bobcats range over anywhere from 8 to 125 square miles, depending on suitable habitat and available food sources. They favor ‘urban edge’ environments, where human development pressures and overlaps wilder habitats. Our corner of the Hudson Valley untidily occupies that Venn diagram—horse and dairy farms breaking up more densely built clusters and everything edged up to lonelier state forest and bisected north-south by the Appalachian Trail.
Our particular corner is just over three acres of mostly wooded hillside. Walking along the collapsed stone wall that outlines our property, it’s common for us to encounter—via scat, sight, or musky smell—bears, fox, rabbits, raccoons, groundhogs, squirrels, voles, chipmunk, and a vast, voraciously omnivorous, deer herd that never thins. Textbook range for a solitary bobcat. This second week in December, the bears have started their hibernation, and the deer are just finishing up their seasonal rut. There will be plenty of road kill. Perfect for this silky bobcat to lay on fat for the coming lean, cold, season.
In the late fall and winter, bobcats become more broadly diurnal, following the daylight-centric patterns of their primary prey. We’re lucky today, in the first three hours after dawn, to come across this cat. Threading morning sunlight catches in the cat’s coat as it wanders away from us—a glimpse of the wildness that suffuses the landscape.
Given the degree of domesticity we’ve compulsively imposed on our environment—the houses, power lines, tarmac-ed roads and strip malls—it’s easy to miss the vast background context: the essential ferocity of this emergent world. Underneath the concrete order there’s still earth: dirt and rock and skeins of trees teeming with insects and wildlife. Loomed micorrhizal networks exchanging water, sugar, nitrogen, carbon. This world imagining itself into space; weaving its own wild order.
This bobcat an invitation to let go of my ordered, structured thoughts and embrace the fierce logic of attention, silence and imagination. The wild logic of a sudden bobcat, a shaft of morning light through the interlaced, bare branches of trees; light fallen across dried brown leaves and thick moss.
The bobcat disappearing into the tree line over a collapsing woodpile, a locus of feral thought vanishing into the empty.
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One more thing.
As a zen priest I’m a student of Tenshin Fletcher Roshi at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center. For more info on Yokoji, please visit www.zmc.org.
I’m also the caretaker of Warwick Zendo, a small in-person and online sangha based in the lower Hudson Valley of New York. if you’d like to check out our practice community, we’re at www.warwickzen.org.
How this works.
I plan to post at least once a week, at minimum. The Freeside will offer those weekly posts, which will always be accessible. Payside will (eventually) offer access to some longer writing and ongoing investigations into practices both literary and zen.
Payside also helps to sustain this project, and this practice. Like any creative project, keep sweeping is a kind of labor, and as such, your support to sustain that labor is much appreciated.
If Payside is not for you, that’s all good. The posts will keep coming on Freeside. The support of your reading and attention is a deeply appreciated gift, and I thank you for being here.
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