The Garden of the Seasons: Still Moments in the Shakers' Woods

          Late October. Some of the trees are bare. Some shedding leaves as we watch. In ones or twos, or a dozen when a breeze blows, the yellowing leaves float down, breeze sensitive.

         Any motion, any gesture cutting the air pressure column causes the descending nearly weightless entity of a falling leaf to change direction. That's why you can't catch them.  
         The first thing you notice on mild, calm October days such as those we had last weekend, even before the falling leaves, is the silence. 

          We wanted that silence. We wanted to enter and be swallowed up by the presence of trees, those speechless companions, loosing the superfluities of the growing season, those solar-gathering leaves, to better save their energies for the cold, dormant time ahead. 
           We found those quiet woods on the property of Hancock Shaker Village, a site a few miles away from the city of Pittsfield in northern Berkshire County.

            The village itself was the home of a once highly successful community established in the late 18th century by a religious movement begun earlier in England by the "charismatic" prophet Anne Lee. Today the village is a museum, after the Shakers closed it in 1960. In its early 19th century heyday the Shakers provided a refuge for women, and men, who needed a home, a means of support, and perhaps an alternative to conventional life. It also provided a home for those whose need was even more acute -- orphaned children, in an era before government care for orphans.  

             We hiked in Hancock Shakers' woods up to the summit called Shaker Mountain now, though the Shakers themselves had given it the Biblical name of Mount Sinai. 
              The Sun was out and the trees sluiced its light, yellow and orange foliage shining in its glow. Alternating strips of shadow and slight carpeting the path before us and the forest floor. Trees going about their business. Getting along with rocks. Providing some nourishment for the woodland creatures who feed on their seeds. Silently cheering on the few still-running streams that bring fresh water to wild places. 
           We followed the woodland stream the Shakers had fitted with piping to provide themselves with clean water. And dammed with flat stone buttresses to power a mill wheel to grind their grain. 
             The defining way of life in Shaker villages was celibacy. This was the fulcrum of Mother Ann Lee's founding vision: abstaining from sex was the path you took to get into heaven. Pacifism and gender equality came into play as well. Men and women lived separately, but but otherwise communally at the Shaker village and lived off the produce of their farm. The Hancock property was essentially a dairy farm. The selling of garden seeds was a big business too. And at some point, of course, the wonderful, defining legacy of Shaker furniture came into play.

            The plain style of their handsome furniture is evident in Hancock Village's architecture as well.

            The movement began to run out of steam in the 1840s, and folks left New England farming communities to move west or find industrial jobs in cities. I think also the difficulty of replenishing population without making your own next generation told on the movement as well.
             Before today's museum village, it was the Shakers themselves who looked after these woods, this hillside, this summit. On the summit of Shaker Mountain, the Hancock Shakers, following a directive from their movement's leaders, cleared a regular quadrant for a burial place. That squared-off clearing has been preserved. The weeds and brush cut back. 
             We walked a narrow path through it, preserving its silence, feeling its peace.