Inspiration from my morning walk…
A blanket of heavy fog wraps itself about the shoulders of pines, large and small. I feel it’s warm embrace despite the 40 degree temperature. My soul urges me to get out into the insulation before the warmth of the sun dissolves this cocoon and with it, my capacity for indwelling.
Bundled up, I step onto the trail, littered with pine needles and letharia vulpina, like chartreuse confetti to welcome my arrival. The fecund fragrance of wet earth, the sharp scent of damp pavement fill my nostrils, a mainline to my brain, sparking the remembrance of a northwestern upbringing.
This is life. Rich, wet, soft, vital.
My heart aches for the remembered wisps of walks in the woods, weekend camping trips, the imaginative adventures of a child. For a moment, I feel myself held in the arms of the Great Mother and everything is right.
I waylay my usual persistent pace of exercise for a more rambling cadence that invites suggestion from my surroundings as to where to turn next. The forest is sparse here in my neighborhood in the high Sierras, but a denser patch of small trees calls to me with their shaded and eerie whispers and I veer off the paved path to make my way to them. Like walking on memory foam, each slow step is received just as slowly by the wet ground under a mattress of golden needles. My mind flashes again to childhood, the way each Western Washington trail is soft and receptive underfoot, earth blessing each step, each step receiving it’s blessings. I savor the short stroll through this tender patch of ground, stopping to touch the slender trunks, a greeting of recognition.
This mornings birdsong has been scant, occasionally punctuating the air with the triple note of mountain chickadee, but as I exit the off piste patch of trees, sun breaks through fog and suddenly invades my swaddling with light. As if on cue, the birdsong doubles in volume and frequency, cacophony. Somehow, this saddens me, like rupturing my cocoon prematurely, exposing my soupy soul, stunting the imaginal cells in the midst of their magical imagining.
I did deep to stay inside, let the sunlight glint off the surface of my shell, so that I might stay in and germinate, journey a little longer.
I am stunned again and again into the beauty of it all as I walk; the smell of earth, the symphony of birdsong, the soft whisper of a tiny stream and the simplicity of the natural world pulsing rhythmically to it’s own melody. The profound remembrance that this is also ME, stops me in my tracks and I close my eyes, feel the beat of my own breath, the pulse of my own heart and know how it moves in time with the orchestra around me. For a moment, I dissolve into the field of energy, blessed. And then, too quickly, I’m back, feeling my feet on the ground.
I turn to make my way back to the car and am suddenly aware of the noise of “Man”, cars and trucks speeding up the highway a few hundred yards away, the roar of iron birds overhead. The noise has increased noticeably today. The world is coming back “online” after this month in quarantine. The unease of a species deeply conditioned to run at breakneck speeds until they’ve run themselves into the ground, is palpable, their urge to return to the familiar, maddening. This saddens me on a visceral level. My body physically resists; my heart hardens, gets heavy, my head feels suddenly pressurized, and as though I were being pushed from behind by some malevolent force, the familiar habitual urge “TO DO” swells in me and triggers nausea instantly.
I do not want to go back. To that life. Not to what it was before this. Not back to the rush and push of a culture driven by consumption, corruption, achievement and not-enough-ness. Not back to a world where people infest the land like the virus that we think is the problem. Not a place where people are infesting and infecting, killing off bug and beast and beauty in our destructful wake.
Enough of that.
More of this…the pause, the quiet, the stopping. If you pay attention and listen, you can feel the earth relax, you can hear her sigh from the relief of having us off her literal back for just a moment in time. And to see how quickly she recovers, this earth, when she is not being beaten daily at the hands of humans. She is miraculous, resilient.
As I walk back into the thick of the trees, I am greeted again by the bright celebration of scattered green lichen. I bend to gather a pillow of it in my hand. It’s soft, limp, pliable from the earlier rain, like the remaining body of a freshly departed soul before rigor sets in. I am reminded of the cycle of life and death that this culture struggles madly to deny, but none of us are immune from.
The evenings rain still clings to the branches, hanging from the tips of needles like tears of the trees. I reach my hand out to touch a sapling, my finger tip gently meeting the drop of rain like an old friend. It settles and slowly traces it’s way down my finger and I realize, I too am crying.
My gaze rises to meet the body of this being and I whisper, “I know. Just like me, just like me.”