“Position your desk to face a wall. Keep your back to the window. Hang pictures and put all decorations on the other side of the room so they don’t distract you.”
I received a handout with advice like this when I started high school, and then again when I began university. The message was repeated once more when I joined the workforce. Not in a handout this time, nothing so brazen. But an unspoken truth built into the architecture of many offices where I worked — all grey boxes and windows sealed shut.
Advice like this never made sense to me. Life is too short to turn my back on the world. Perhaps they could have quoted Annie Dillard instead, when she said: “How you spend your days is, of course, how you spend your life.” Even in deep concentration, the brain needs a breather if it’s going to function well. We all need to look up from time to time. It’s good to be facing a tree when you do.
I work from home these days, and have for the last 15 or so years. The past 8 of those have been from our log home in the woods, where my desk faces a bank of three windows, and dozens of trees beyond them. By contrast, the last downtown office I worked in was grey boxes all the way down. First, you enter the outer building, the biggest grey box. Inside, you ride up in a medium-sized grey box elevator, and step out under a grey ceiling tile sky lit by fluorescent bulb suns. A short walk over a patch of grey carpet delivers you to your final destination — your very own grey box cube. The walls just tall enough you can’t see out, just short enough you lack privacy. The days smelled of cheap carpet, glue, and recycled air. Fresher air and bluer skies were locked the other side of those always-closed windows. Not that it mattered much, since my back was turned to them anyways.
There are people who hold so much rainbow inside of them that it doesn’t matter if they’re in the blandest box. Those people bring light and vitality to every space they enter and they are worth their weight in gold. I admire, but am not one of them. I am solar-powered.
I’m sitting at my desk in the woods now, and it’s early springtime. Outside, two rabbits are chasing each other under the bird feeders. One charges, and the other waits until the last minute to bounce up and away like a spring. They are clearly both enjoying this game, and I am enjoying trying to make sense of it. (I think they’re both winning.) A vole pops out from under the firewood, a miniature buffalo with places to be. It does a quick lap to check for spilled seeds, and disappears again before I blink. The cedars in front of the window are ochre-yellow, heavy with pollen. There are catkins hanging from the aspen, like a million tiny purple windsocks, pointing in unity after the direction of the breeze. It went that way.
In one of his final interviews, author Maurice Sendak reflected on his life as he neared its end: “It’s something I’m finding out as I’m aging, that I am in love with the world. And I look right now as we speak together out my window in my studio and I see my trees, my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, and they are beautiful, and you see, I can see how beautiful they are, I can take time to see how beautiful they are.”
One of the great gifts about working from home is getting the corners of your life back. Getting back all that time spent on commutes and lunch breaks and coffee runs. Minutes that turn into hours. And now that I spend that time here, in this forested neighbourhood, with these sky-scraping trees. And suddenly the details of living alongside a particular place has a chance to seep in. I learn things in spite of myself. I learn which bird songs are familiar, so the unusual ones catch my ear. I get used to the greenery on the path, and so I notice the earliest signs of change. I learn seasons within seasons within seasons. The before-spring season, and the spring-just-starting season. The day you spot the first tiny red tongues of trout lily leaves poking out of the earth. The first umbrella-tops of mayapple pushing through the dirt.
In late April, I go for a lunch hour stroll in the woods. Near the end of my walk, there is a three-stemmed white oak, and spring beauties always bloom at its toes. I stop to check, and, yes, there they are. The few blooms from last week have multiplied into a delicate pink carpet. I am not alone in noticing — a red admiral butterfly is eagerly supping from the flowers. A few steps away, a bird scrabbles in the leaves on the ground. Then it hops up and perches perfectly still on a branch. It’s on the shadow side of the tree, and it’s too dark to tell what it is. When it eventually pops down to re-investigate the duff, I see it’s a hermit thrush. Quiet and curious and charming, it stares at me with one eye, and allows me to get tantalizingly close before it flits up and away. I come back from lunch refreshed and recharged and ready to work. I’ve added new landmarks to my mental map of the woods (“here there be hermit thrush”; “there are butterflies on the beauties”). I’ve learned more about this place and this time and my place in it.
Along with the infusions of beauty, I also learn here how to face the colder harder realities of the world. Here, where I can’t turn away from them so easily. I am glad to know this place, top to bottom, in sickness and in health. I see the beauty of the cedars out my window, and I also see the white pine blister rust. Living on my well, I share the same groundwater as the trees, and together we share the challenges of a drought year. I saw the trees when they were dripping with spongy moth caterpillars. The caterpillars that fell on my shoulders and squished underfoot. But I also saw the day when the population got so far out of balance that it collapsed under its own weight, and the caterpillars suddenly fell to the ground, dead. The next spring, most trees that had lost their leaves the previous year grew new ones, and other life grew quickly in the spaces where they could suddenly see sky. This living office is a constant reminder of rhythms and consequences and complexity. It holds everything all at once. Everything that didn’t fit inside a little grey box.
“If you can, face out at the world. Notice everything, big and small. In these trying times, fill your eyes with as much of the beauty and complexity and pain of the world as you can hold. Let the world distract and expand you, and then fold it back into yourself. Let it inform your work and who you are. Let the beauty be a balm, and let the pain be fuel. Be careful when you turn away from the window, be careful when you turn your back on the world.”
~Kate