We Dwell in Possibility: Uncertain Times in the Hickory Nut Gorge

A Letter From Mattie Decker

For Lake Lure Breeze – Coming out in March

Anyone who lives here in the Hickory Nut Gorge knows all about uncertainty after living, into, through, and beyond the storm of September 2025. This theme of “not knowing”, what is called “Zen Mind” and “beginner’s mind” is very up close and personal for us all. Even now, after months of being “in recovery” and listening to family and friends from afar asking, “how are you doing, now?” “Are things getting back to normal”? We may yet feel an ongoing kind of surreal experience, impossible to describe to those not here. Watching scenes of the destruction on television, or on video clips on social media can actually make it all seem even more unreal—a scene you are “watching”. For us here, we are living it.  

It is an eerie fact that in early September I was writing this article in Ireland, where it’s known as a “thin” space. My blood and bone somehow know the truth of whatever this means. A place between…where possibilities are born and there’s a strange sense of openness, of “not knowing”…of mystery known and curiously welcomed! A freeing space of “possibility.” 

According to the old stories, the Hickory Nut Gorge was just such a “thin space”. The Cherokee and the Catawba knew this. They knew that where two streams meet is a holy place. And here there were five streams gathering together at Bat Cave: Reedy Creek coming down from the eastern Continental divide from Edneyville, and the Hickory Nut Creek, and the Middle Fork of the Hickory Nut Creek, and then the Broad River, along with Grassy Creek coming down from Shumont.  Both tribes wanted to pass through here but were afraid. They knew it was a sacred place and so they would have their holy men—and holy women, as the Cherokee was a matriarchy—come and hold rituals here, so that they could then, pass through, safely.  

After the storm I pondered this story. Those of us drawn here, have known such thoughts alive to us as we have stood still, or walked the woods and along rocky streams or gazed out at the grandeur and expanse of Lake Lure and discovered that we meet a sense of awe, and feel a kind of inexplicable grandeur in ourselves. It may appear late at night or early morning, a place of quiet, of peace, residing deep within us right in the midst of the destruction and upheaval. 

For those of us still here, we confess to learning the difference between a problem, and an inconvenience.  

We dwell in possibility. What some call the “gateless gate”, the “placeless place”, a new threshold where we can, step boldly into the unknown. Into a place of humility and gratitude that defies language. I cannot thank the people who came from other states with large equipment and cleared our drive that was covered in mountain and fallen trees. I do not even know their names. They simply came, camped out overnight, worked, and then before I knew it, they were gone, back to Tennessee, or Virginia.  

Indeed, this time we are living in, feels very much like a kind of collective “thin space” of “not knowing”, a time of increasing uncertainty filled with the “unknown” before us. Yet here we are, and the river still sings; the birds, and sky overhead, may remind us to sing, too. 

I recently heard a story of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, who, when asked why he spoke and wrote about Happiness after all that he had lost, his land, his home. His quiet reply was, “they have taken everything,–why should I let them take my happiness?” 

Oh, may we all breathe in deeply this air of our beloved Hickory Nut Gorge and feel the mystery of being alive, relax deeply into our inner stillness, perhaps, even, as Dickinson closed her stanza with these words: 

Mattie

https://www.hidasta.com/

Tags: Forest Bathing, Hickory Nut Gorge