"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."
-Seneca
If you're my age, you probably thought that line was the creation of Semisonic, in the song "Closing Time." Turns out its origins lie in writings by one of the great minds of ancient stoicism. Who knew?
Pondering this Friday how we got here, why there's a Wyldswood at all. What is our Genesis 1?
As in the actual Genesis, the tricky part is finding where to start. For those with even less biblical Hebrew than your author, you may not be aware that there's some controversy regarding how Genesis actually begins. We all know the line, "In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth . . ." The trouble is, that's not what the words in Hebrew actually mean. Instead, maybe it's "in a beginning . . .", or "in the beginning when God created . . . " You see the issue here. Taken literally, Genesis 1 doesn't chronicle the beginning of creation, or of the universe, but rather the moment in time that the author chooses to take up the story of God's creation of this place, already on some sort of broader temporal continuum. There could well be a prequel.
If you find this sort of navel gazing interesting, and want to learn more, here's a nice, short essay discussing the exegetical dilemma.
So where does the Wyldswood creation story begin? It's all a matter of when the raconteur chooses to begin the story.
Maybe it's in Bluegrass, in a pasture ringed by thickly wooded ridgelines where a knobby-kneed, ten-year-old Peg stood on the saddle of her horse in a self-directed riding act, or stretched out on her back in the crotch of a tree, dreaming of the day she'd have a farm of her own.
Or perhaps it was the day she answered a call from a rural hospital in--where in the hell is Taylor County, anyway? She looks at a map, quotes a ridiculous price for a weekend locums gig, and a couple days later leave stuffy Ponte Vedra on a road leading west through swamps and planted pines to a home she'd never seen.
No, it's probably one particular sunset a couple years later. She's living in a cramped apartment off Byron Butler Parkway, but on this evening she's sitting in her car in a clearing surrounded by thick pines and live oaks, dog fennel grown up to her sideview mirrors. The sun's just now setting through that giant old oak in front of her, branches dripping with spanish moss. There's a low, swampy thicket down to her right, basically a big mud puddle full of neighbors' trash and a couple abandoned bicycles.
But she can see it, plain as can be in her mind's eye, see something no one else perceives around her. In this forsaken corner of swamp and woods, she can see Wyldswood.
So, with the prodding of Buster, her avuncular guide to all things TayCo, Peg buys the old Lockhart property in 2002. She adds an adjacent parcel she purchases from Charles Mincy a year later, then finally a third piece she buys from Buster a couple years after that. She pays too much; everyone figures the "rich doc" can afford it, not realizing she's flying all over the country trying to earn enough to make this leap of faith work.
Somewhere between buying the Mincy parcel and Buster's acreage, she breaks ground on the main house in December of 2003. The contractor is a buffoon, and ends up building the house five feet shorter than the plans. She goes to arbitration, alone, and cleans his clock.
The house is finished in May of 2005. For a while the place is filled with people, family and neighbors and life. Then the lights go out for a while, quite a long while actually. Peg sets up household in Panama City, starts a new job, makes the best of a Babylonian Captivity while squatters occupy her beloved farm.
And then one day, over four years ago now, she comes home. I was authorized to wield an aspergillum back then, and we went room-by-room, tossing a little holy water and mumbling prayers together as we pronounced a new beginning for this now sacred space. Months and months of hard work lay ahead for us, but the worst days were over. And best of all, this skill-less child of the suburbs, afraid of cows and unable to decipher the pedals of a tractor, would get to share Peg's vision for this place and the life we'd build here.
I reckon we wandered past Genesis and right through Exodus, with a splash of Nehemiah and the Psalms, sojourners expelled from the garden only to come home in the end. And now to share it with friends, some we've known forever and some we've yet to meet.
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