“Both friends came to realize that walking over long distances and spans of time is the surest way to find oneself.” Tobjorn Ekelund In Praise of Paths: Walking Through Time and Nature p. 33 I gazed into the campfire, watched the yellow and orange flames rise and fall, heard the crackle of burning wood, and smelled the wood smoke. Watching the flickering flames I made a decision to get up early and take a long hike. I wanted to better…
As the day designated for my surgery loomed steadily closer thoughts arose; in bad moments anxious scenarios of death, disability and disfigurement; in calmer moments practical concerns about all that needed to be done to prepare for the operation that would require a long incision across my neck. One morning, ten days out from surgery, my mind jumped past the surgery to the recovery process. I saw myself immersed in an image of all the plant and animal life surrounding…
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, Robert Frost Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening Prologue I made my promise suddenly at the end of an hour long sit spot on a windy, bitterly cold January afternoon. Surrounded by brown and gray, dead and dormant winter trees I felt a need to see the symmetry of the seasons. I promised to return during the first week of June when the forest was reborn,…
Prologue John Slender strands of mist swirled over the still surface of Prompton Lake; lacy twelve inch strands, swirling clock wise, counter clockwise. I stood by the lake and watched each of my exhalations form a small cloud that floated out and mingled with the morning mist. It seemed as if my breath, although following a different time scale, somehow joined the greater respiration of the lake. Behind me I heard a few morning bird songs; the insistent teecha,…
Dark green Norway spruces bordered each side of the abandoned road. The trees, planted by design many years ago now reached sixty feed up into a leaden April sky. The upsweeping branches arched over the road creating the quieting effect of a cathedral nave, an entranceway into the sacred realm of nature, a realm I wanted to wander in , a realm I needed to connect with. Walking beneath the spruce boughs I recalled something I had recently read in…
6:40 a.m. Approach I drove the golf cart down the Perimeter Road of Isla Muheres, a slender six mile long island off the coast of Cancun. Peering out toward the Caribbean in the faint pre-dawn light I could just see the long white crests of waves rolling shoreward. Over the whine of the golf cart motor I could just hear the rolling thump-crash of waves breaching upon rocks and sand. Headlights on I kept watch for the brutal topes, the…
Only a 15% charge on my phone. Foolish to head into the woods to sit for an hour in 10 degree wind chill without a way to communicate. After plugging in the phone, I sat quietly and read, glad to have a few moments to draw in to the world of impressions and ideas. I thought about my intentions for the sit spot ahead. Having recently read how each locale in nature has its own unique sound patterns and its…
“I became fully aware of the wind. I heard the gusts approaching as they rattled the branches, sometimes a wave of wind to my left, sometimes a wave to my right, and sometimes the wind bore down across the open lake, the cold breeze biting at my face, causing me to hunker down.” The Stillness of the Living Forest: A Year of Listening and Learning. Week 2: A Stiff Breeze from the Northwest. Page 25 An immersion in waves of…
The Theme For many years a string of beaver ponds, like shiny pearls on a necklace, ran along a little unnamed creek that flowed through a shallow valley of second growth woods and overgrown pastures just a half mile from my house. While taking walks I always enjoyed pausing and looking at the ponds, seeing the open water that reflected the sky and registered the wind, watching the geese, ducks and herons that lived there, and discovering the work zones…
In her book, Radical Joy for Hard Times, Trebbe Johnson wrote “…each place possesses its own particular presence, a dynamic animate force that the Romans called the genius loci, or soul of the place. The personality of this genius loci is formed by the entire human and natural history of the place and continues to express itself in the kinds of experiences people have there.” As I read this passage I knew that I had to return to my home…