The Woman on the Mountain

I am high in the mountains somewhere in central Mexico.

It is September. The sun is bright, but at this elevation the air is dry and cool, with just the faintest suggestion of autumn in it.

I am standing on a narrow red-dirt road that runs along the top of the mountain. The land drops steeply away on both sides. Tall cactuses grow among the grasses and short, scrubby trees, and from up here I can see for miles.

There is a little village farther down the road. I have been spending time with some of the families who live there, and today I am walking with one of the women.

She is small, with several tiny children following her everywhere she goes. She carries a basket in her arms and is leading me somewhere. She knows exactly where she is going.

We are going to pick fruit.

Just over the ridge, the hillside drops sharply away. Nance trees grow on the slope, covered with little yellow fruits that look something like cherries.

The hill is much too steep for me to climb down comfortably, but she doesn't need to. Because of the incline, she can stand farther up the slope and still reach the higher branches.

She plucks the first nance from the tree, pops it into her mouth, and spits out the seed.

The seed lands on the ground.

Immediately, it sprouts.

A tree rises from the earth in seconds, growing until it is perhaps a third the height of the original tree.

The woman barely notices.

She simply begins picking fruit from it and putting the nance into her basket.

Her children notice.

They scramble down the hillside as easily as little goats and gather around the new tree. They run their hands over its smooth bark and peer upward into its leaves. They are delighted.

I want to go down there with them.

Normally I could probably manage the hill if I were careful, but today I am wearing the wrong shoes. Sandals. My feet slide around inside them, and looking at the steep slope, I feel that little prickle of fear that tells me this would be a stupid thing to attempt.

So I don't.

I sit down in the red dirt instead.

This gets the woman's attention.

Apparently a tree springing fully formed from a discarded seed is perfectly ordinary, but me sitting in the dirt is cause for concern.

She looks at me and gestures as though perhaps I shouldn't be sitting there. I get the impression that she wishes she could offer me a chair.

I smile and motion back that I am perfectly comfortable.

The children see me sitting down and apparently take this as an invitation.

They come scrambling back up the hillside.

Suddenly one is sitting in my lap, another is leaning against my shoulder, and another is playing with my hair.

Their mother frowns.

Now she thinks her children are bothering me.

I smile again and shake my head. I let her know that I am quite happy with them exactly where they are.

She goes back to picking nance.

When she finally climbs back up the hill, I realize something I hadn't noticed before.

There is a baby on her back.

The baby is swaddled against her body in a long piece of cloth wrapped securely around them both.

All this time she hasn't simply been navigating that hillside and picking fruit while carrying a basket.

She has been carrying a baby too.

And now I can see that the climb back up is hard work even for her.

She knows which clumps of grass are firmly rooted and grabs them to pull herself upward. She knows exactly what will hold her weight and what won't.

When she reaches the top, she brushes off her skirts.

Then she holds out her hand to help me stand.

I don't need help getting up.

But I take her hand anyway.

It seems important to let her help me.

We continue along the red-dirt road until it ends. Just beyond it, built into the side of the hill, is her house.

A narrow path leads steeply downward.

Once again, I look at my sandals.

This time I need to go down.

So I take them off.

My bare feet can grip the dirt much better than my shoes can. There is nothing to hold onto, so I turn slightly sideways and carefully make my way down.

The entrance to the house doesn't really have a door. There is simply a curtain hanging across the opening.

She pulls it aside.

I have to duck to enter.

She doesn't.

The children tumble inside behind us.

The house is dark and cool. The floor is dirt. There is one window looking out into the trees. A wooden bench sits beside a rough table that reminds me a little of a picnic table.

There is soup.

Chicken soup.

But it is nothing like my chicken soup.

She puts a bowl in front of me. It contains broth and an entire chicken leg.

There are no utensils.

Then she puts a plate of tortillas on the table.

I stare at the soup.

I know perfectly well that I am expected to eat it. I just have absolutely no idea how.

So I watch her.

She folds a tortilla and uses it to grasp the hot chicken, pulling pieces of meat from the bone and eating them with the tortilla. Then she tears another tortilla into smaller pieces, folds one slightly, and uses it almost like a spoon to scoop up the broth.

So I do what she does.

Badly.

Before long I have broth on my fingers and probably on my chin. There are no napkins, so I use pieces of tortilla to wipe my fingers and clean my face. Nobody seems particularly concerned about my technique.

Then her husband comes inside.

He is a short, small-boned man with skin the color of coffee with cream. His trousers end several inches above his ankles. He wears a red button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a machete hangs at his hip.

He looks as though he has been working outside.

When he sees me sitting at the table eating his family's food, his face breaks into an enormous smile.

He is missing several teeth.

I begin to stand so I can greet him properly.

He immediately motions for me to sit back down.

Eat.

He seems genuinely happy that I am enjoying the food his family has offered me. And they clearly don't have much.

He doesn't join us at the table. Instead, he sits in a wooden chair in the corner, something that looks as though it was made by hand.

And then I see how tired he is.

Not simply physically tired.

Defeated.

Something has happened to the fields.

They grow a kind of pumpkin or squash, and there has been an infestation. Much of the crop has been destroyed.

I look at him and my heart goes out to him.

And there is absolutely nothing I can do.

I don't have enough money to solve a problem like this. Even if I did, simply handing him money would not necessarily be the right thing to do.

I cannot repair the field.

I cannot replace the crop.

I cannot make the slow season disappear.

So I don't try to fix anything.

I simply let myself feel compassion for him.

He feels it.

Nothing dramatic happens. He doesn't suddenly brighten and leap from his chair. The problem is still there.

But somehow the load becomes just a little lighter because another human being sees how heavy it is.

Eventually it is time for me to leave.

The woman takes a large plastic container that once held some other food. She has washed and saved it, and now she fills it with nance.

She gives it to me.

The funny thing is, I don't particularly like nance.

But I know immediately that I must accept them.

This family has very little. Their crop has just been damaged. By every sensible calculation, they should keep every bit of food they have.

And still she needs to give me something.

So I receive it.

I hold the container of little yellow fruits and tell her thank you.

I hug her and kiss her cheek. A strand of hair has fallen across her face, and I brush it away. I look directly into her eyes and tell her again.

Thank you.

I nod to her husband and thank him too.

They know I mean it.

And that is enough.

Then I leave.

Following the Thread

This story began with a rune.

I asked a very simple question:

What is the message for today?

I pulled Hagalaz.

Rather than looking at its traditional meanings and trying to decide what the rune was telling me, I allowed an image to appear and followed it. One question at a time, I watched the mountain, the woman, the children, the fruit trees, the house and the family emerge.

Only afterward did I look back at the story through the lens of Hagalaz.

Hagalaz is often associated with disruption: the things that enter our lives without permission and cannot simply be controlled away.

That certainly appeared here.

The family's crop had been damaged. They had lost food they needed. The husband couldn't undo it. Neither could I.

But strangely, the story wasn't really about the damaged field.

It was about what remained.

Again and again, someone encountered circumstances they couldn't change.

I couldn't safely follow the children down the hillside, so I sat in the dirt.

And the children came to me.

The woman couldn't make the mountain less steep, but she knew which grasses would hold her weight.

My sandals couldn't carry me safely down the path, so I took them off and used my bare feet.

I didn't know how to eat the soup, so I watched someone who did.

I couldn't solve the husband's problem, so I stopped needing to solve it and simply sat with him in his sadness.

And a family with very little still had something to give me.

Perhaps that was the most important part.

We sometimes imagine compassion as a relationship between the person who has something and the person who needs something.

But that wasn't what happened on the mountain.

We all gave.

We all received.

She gave me food. I received it.

She offered her hand. I took it, even though I didn't need help standing.

Her children gave me their affection, and I gave them a lap, a shoulder and my hair to play with.

Her husband allowed me to see his sorrow.

I gave him nothing that could be counted, bought or carried home.

I simply saw him.

And when I left, the woman gave me fruit she could easily have kept for her own family.

I accepted it because receiving her gift was also a way of honoring her.

Nobody was above anybody else.

Nobody needed to be rescued.

We were simply human beings sitting together for a little while in circumstances none of us could entirely control.

Maybe that is another face of Hagalaz.

When the field cannot be repaired today, when the season cannot be hurried along, when there simply isn't enough money to fix everything that needs fixing, we are not left with nothing.

We can still feed one another.

We can still accept what someone else has to give.

We can still sit in the dirt.

We can still notice when another person's burden is heavy.

We can still allow ourselves to be known.

And somewhere nearby, a seed can fall onto the ground and begin growing.

Perhaps nobody even needs to call it a miracle.