Everyone needs some down time now and then, and I’ll take some this weekend. A vacation more than an escape, and as much because I have the short-term convenience of having a car for the weekend – and there’s a meteor shower to see! I will be away, offline, in the trees, for a couple days. Back again soon. 🙂
We each have an idea of what feels peaceful. 🙂
I hope you enjoy your weekend, whatever you choose to do with it. 🙂
My view of the meadow, covered by morning mist rising from the marsh, is obscured by condensation on the window, left open during the night. My view is obscured by my perspective. Something to think about, generally.
Sometimes I have to change my perspective to enjoy the view…
Today my traveling partner [figuratively, metaphorically] becomes my literal traveling partner, headed to a favorite festival. I smile every time I think about him enjoying himself there. I come back to the thought frequently; I enjoy his joy. 🙂
I caught myself getting caught up in the news… the usual horror and tedium, frankly, and fairly dismal. Getting mired in it does no one any good, and doesn’t change things. I can change only those things that are precisely and specifically changeable by me. It’s entirely a worthwhile endeavor to be the best human being I can, without bothering with the day-to-day stress and drama of comparison, or competition. Yeah, life? It’s so not a competition. What a lie I’d been sold there! When I allow myself to be distracted by how well you are doing, or how well that famous person over there is doing, or how well a motivational speaker suggests I could be doing, or any number of other frankly revenue-generating (for someone) bits of bamboozlement, I lose precious time on my own authentic journey. Sometimes the journey is difficult. It’s mine. Sometimes the journey is a disastrous maze of detours. It’s mine. Sometimes the journey is fraught with confusion, sorrow, or anger. It’s mine. Sometimes the journey is delightful, joyful, and fun. It’s mine. My journey to make on my own terms; I am my own cartographer, having my own experience. Sure – we’re all in this together, and that matters, too. Still my journey, on my terms, in my own time – and similarly, yours belongs to you. We don’t gain much when we try to use someone else’s map… and we lose a lot when we’re sold on someone else’s destination. Just saying. Do you.
The mist begins to lift, the sky to lighten. I hear crows discussing their plan for the morning. I see the earliest hints of autumn in the trees on the far side of the park; shades of yellow and orange beginning to show in the summer green foliage.
Today is a good day to wish the world well, and my traveling partner too; each of us having our own experience. Each of us on our own journey. Today is a good day to be authentic, genuine, and also the very best of who I am able to be. (Each of us doing so would change the world.) 🙂
I’d put it off for weeks. (For years?) It wasn’t even a long hike (2.5 miles). It wasn’t rough terrain, just steep (as steep as 6%). As a bus ride, Terwilliger Blvd is long-ish, twisting through forest, around the sides of small-ish mountains, gaining and losing elevation. It’s also quite lovely, with views that are difficult to enjoy driving a vehicle, or to enjoy long enough as passenger. I’ve had my eye on walking it for… years. Yesterday was a lovely cool misty gray morning, suitable for hiking. So I went.
Hey, this isn’t so bad…
I felt rather reassured that on foot, the perceived steepness of the paved trail seems quite manageable. Trail? Sidewalk? Hiking? Walking? Do those distinctions matter? Not today.
In the distance, a city I love.
The first view-point, hiking from my starting point at Sam Jackson Park Rd, was well up the hill and quite beautiful enough that if the hike had been tough going, I could have contentedly turned back at that point and felt satisfied with my progress… maybe. I exchanged pleasant greetings with a nice elder gentleman smoking a large aromatic cigar, and walked on.
A route for another day.
I observe side trails along the way, taking note of each one and considering future hikes as I pass by. Once they are behind me, I return my attention to the path I am on, and this moment, now.
What’s left of us when we’re gone?
Along the road, off in the weeds, are the remnants of a well-planned exercise course laid out along Terwilliger Parkway. It hasn’t been maintained. The signage is rotting away in the weeds. Stations with exercise equipment still in place (like this one with a balance bar) are in disrepair, and not safe to use. We leave bits of ourselves behind as we move forward in life, don’t we? I found myself curious about the vision and intent of the parkway itself, and promise myself I’ll read up on it when I return home.
Nearing the top… and a place to rest.
It would seem amusingly metaphorical some minutes later… but for now, I pause to enjoy a celebratory moment – I can see ‘the top’ just ahead!
The top!
Nope. Not the top at all. Just a peak, not the peak. There’s a lesson to be learned there, something about becoming attached to, or emotionally invested in, some goal or another… 🙂
…And then, too, there’s the part about how it rained softly much of the way.
I have a raincoat, and proper rain gear for hiking. I could have worn it. Or brought it. Or checked the forecast. Instead, I just enjoy the soft mist, and cool fresh scent of petrichor as I walk through the forest.
Another beautiful view.
I look eagerly up the trail… (“No. It’s not the top. Stop asking.” I tell myself.)
Beautiful parks and green spaces dot the trail.
It’s a lovely day, and delightfully, I have the trail (and the day) mostly to myself. It is quiet, aside from the sound of traffic passing me now and then. Good timing… mid-morning on a Tuesday. 🙂
Just beyond the forest, the city.
I keep walking. The trail keeps climbing.
Some of the exercise stations are well back into the trees, and quite overgrown.
Every point of view is subtly different. Each perspective on the city and the world beyond has nuance, and value. The trail just keeps climbing. So do I.
More forest, please.
More acreage has been added to the original parkway over time. The high value placed on green spaces in the community is a characteristic I cherish about living in this area. More forest, more green, more trails… more ways to find a few chill content moments of stillness in a busy world. [Your results may vary.]
A handy side trail down into the dense wetland acreage conveniently at hand.
I stare down the trail into the wetland acreage… It’s tempting… but a lot steeper than I feel prepared for… and I’ve just spent nearly an hour walking a more or less continuous incline. I’m already feeling it. I’m not up to it, standing there staring down the steep staircase built into the bank… but I am thinking about other days, other hikes… I walk on.
Looking back from around the next bend.
I almost reconsider that side trail… I look back from farther up the trail, and see the staircase down through the trees from the other side. New perspective. Yeah… totally too steep for me, in that moment then. I chose wisely. I continue to walk on. My only real destination is to finish the 2.5 miles I’ve planned, and reach the bus stop at the far end. I’ve passed the last bus stop I could take if I cared to shorten the trip; I have to reach the finish at this point.
An exercise station deeper into the forest.
Each exercise station I pass reminds me of other forgotten human endeavors, trips with my Granny to see ghost towns, crumbling homesteads along country roads, isolated cabins left standing in land claimed by national parks… we settle, we live, we move on…
Approaching the final peak on this trail (in this direction).
I laughed at myself when I experienced real relief seeing the final peak in elevation just ahead. Tired, and feeling more committed than joyful at that point, I feel renewed and re-energized by the feeling of achievement. Silly primate – it’s just a hill. lol
Unexpectedly pointless…
I shot a picture standing in a moment of utter stillness. No cars. No voices. No traffic in the distance. Nothing but the soft breeze, birdsong, and one still moment. I breathe. Relax. Exist so gently and contentedly… one moment that put the entire walk into perspective. This. This is my destination. A picture seemed appropriate…
…It was the last picture I took, with half a mile left to go. 🙂 I rounded the next bend and instantly frustrated myself with regret about the way I use my device; the battery died entirely, and my device powered down just as I approached a viewpoint called “Eagle Point”, with a carved wood totem pole standing nearby, and the landmark restaurant located there, The Chart House. I might have considered stopping there for coffee, but I was completely distracted by the sudden lack of camera, my feet were really aching by that point, and the bus stop was just a half mile further, down hill. I got started walking, after a few minutes enjoying the view from Eagle Point.
My bus ticket? On my device, which was as entirely dead and powered down as a device can be and still ever come back to life. lol I’m fortunate that the bus driver was very understanding about it, and my morning hike ending as the afternoon took over. If I took a moment I could remember what I did with the rest of the day… I do remember feeling quite content. That’s enough.
Every day is a solo hike on life’s journey. Destinations come and go, and have only as much meaning as I give them. The map is not the world. The destination is not the journey. I am my own cartographer, and each day is a new beginning. The future is a vast unwritten page in our unfinished story. What will I do with it?
(There are verbs involved.)
I am thinking over the week to come. I won’t see my traveling partner again for a week, and sometime Thursday we’ll lose touch altogether while he’s away, and I won’t hear from him until sometime late Monday or early Tuesday. In all other respects, the next 7 days to come seems entirely ordinary in every way. It’s strange that the presence of one human being, the specific characteristics of one voice, one touch, one human being’s… way, can be so completely woven into so many other elements of my experience, isn’t it? I won’t actually be “without” him… not entirely; I am reminded of him everywhere I turn.
Love is everywhere – well, everywhere we make it.
It’s a gray morning. Traffic in the distance sounds muffled. There is no obvious sunrise, just the day lightening from twilight to definite day time as I sip my coffee. I sit quietly. Writing isn’t so easy today. Some days the words queue up in my consciousness, sentences forming faster than I can type, ideas spilling messily onto the page. This morning? Thought. Consideration. The slow gathering of recalcitrant words. Sentences… sort of. My mind wanders to the lawn beyond the window, the caw of crows on the far side of the park, the morning itself. I am slow to wake fully. I continue to sip my coffee and consider the morning, and to wonder “what life is made of” other than details, choices, consequences and time? It’s not really fair to the topic to describe life with such brevity.
I ache from physical therapy, yesterday. The gray day hinting of rain ensures I don’t overlook my arthritis, either. No headache – that’s something.
A few words exchanged over instant message with my traveling partner makes my morning feel more “real”, more complete, and it’s something I will miss while he is away. This week we don’t travel through life together. We are each having our own experience. Sharing those details will come later. His absence feels more real this morning, having spent last evening together and knowing it’ll be one week from today before we can be in each other’s arms again. I keep coming back to it. Fussy and fretful in some moments, relaxed and content in others. How very human! 🙂
I don’t feel much like writing this morning. That’s come up a few times recently, since being emotionally attacked by someone I thought was a friend, on Facebook (a connection to my recent disinclination to write that I hadn’t previously made). It’s a feeling of subtle over-exposure, an awareness that, yes, people who don’t like me, don’t support my views, disagree with me wholly, find me without value – or worse – may also read my writing. It is, as they say, a free country. I am discomfited by that. It is a strange emotion to acknowledge, and one of the very few emotional experiences that has ever left me feeling reluctant to write. I am struck by the detailed awareness of something that has the potential to silence me as a human being. I don’t like thinking about the feeling; it is as unpleasant as feeling it.
“What is life made of?” seems a good question to ask, and the answers I contemplate have their own value. “What silences me?” seems a terrifying question that I don’t want to ask, and have even less interest in answering – and I resent that. So. Perhaps I will spend this peculiar and rare solo week asking myself that question, and listening to the answers. Life’s curriculum reaches me in many forms.
Today is a good day to face the woman in the mirror quite fearlessly; we’ve been through a lot together, and I know she’s got my back. 🙂
On a whim, yesterday, I put aside my doubts and concerns and hit the trail for a few hours. I definitely needed that. I arrived home tired, feet aching, and feeling renewed, and more “aware of myself” in some hard to describe way. It was a good day for it, and I found the deep feeling of peace and contentment I was yearning for. This too shall pass. 😉
Today has not yet begun, and there’s little to say about it at this point; my coffee is terrible. Yep. I wasn’t really awake, muddling around clumsily. This carelessly made cup of coffee is both bitter and insipid…but it’s hot, it’s got some caffeine in it, I made it for myself, and there’s no one here to impress. I sip it slowly (it’s still quite hot), unconcerned about those other details. I… just don’t actually care this morning that this particular cup of coffee is pretty awful; I made it for myself, and I’m appreciative that I have it now. 🙂
I am struck by a question; do I treat myself better when I hike regularly? I think over yesterday’s journey.
Bees enjoy roses.
I began at the rose garden, picnic lunch in my daypack. I got a later than usual start and the idea of having my lunch among the roses sounded lovely. It wasn’t really… it was crowded with tourists there, even on a weekday. I shared a shaded bench with an elder traveling from afar. We talked of roses, gardens, grandchildren, sunny days, and love.
Tourists also enjoy roses.
I wasn’t looking for company, and when I’d finished lunch I offered my well-wishes to the human being sharing the bench with me and continued on my way, seeking… something. At that point, I didn’t have something specific in mind.
I set off through the trees.
My frustration followed me up the trail at first, in the form of inescapable children’s laughter from the playground area I’d passed by. As the trail became steeper, and wound away from the sounds of the road nearby and the playground now in the distance, the world grew quieter.
What am I seeking? Does it determine what I am able to find?
I kept walking, having fairly quickly reached a seeming ‘the way out is through’ location on the trail. I took fewer pictures than I often do; this one was for me, in that moment, and savoring it was urgently more needed than saving it for later. I listen to myself silently bitch awhile… about the weight I’d gained and haven’t lost, about my feet aching, about the distant sound of traffic (barely audible at that point), about feeling reluctant to return to the work force, about how much harder a steep hike is than I’d like – I was really working at this one!! Then, I really heard me. I stopped at a likely looking log suitable for sitting, and I took some time for that, too.
I’d reached a point in the journey well-suited for stillness. Quite a luxury – no sound of voices, no sound of traffic, and having stopped walking, even the sound of footsteps and self faded from memory. No clock, no timer, no agenda, just one quiet moment to embrace stillness under the trees. I had “arrived”.
Bathed in light, wrapped in stillness. Walking on.
Some time later I resume hiking the trail, considering myself more or less ‘half way’ – since I had “arrived” at a “destination”. It was a lovely day for it, neither too hot nor too cold, and no hint of rain to muddy the trail.
I walked on, contemplating emotions, thoughts, the nature of those things, how they work with or against each other, and in what context. I thought about how much effort so many of us put into forcing ourselves – or others – into tiny well-defined boxes of characteristics, almost insisting that if a being has any one of them, that being must therefore have all those that we have associated with it. We make ourselves crazy forcing our expectations and assumptions on one another. Silly monkeys, we’ve so much room to grow, to live more skillfully, with more heart… “I’ll get right on that” I assure myself, and smiling, I walk on.
That looks painful…
I walk past a tall tree with a spectacular wound, its lifeblood flowing down to the ground, without visible motion, timeless, enduring. I wonder if that hurts? I can’t imagine having such a wound and not being in pain. I think about how we treat each other, as if our wounds don’t pain us, as if we are not suffering together. I stand in silent gratitude for the lesson, and feel that immense sense of age and wisdom, grand experience, mighty tolerance and perspective that I so often feel present, deep in some forest. Small stuff seems pretty small out here. “What are they thinking?” I wonder – I always wonder.
There’s further to go.
I walk on. I walked a good while, actually, covering about 3.5 miles of decently steep well-maintained trails. Once I entered the Hoyt Arboretum, I enjoyed winding around from this trail to that one without much attention to my map, enjoying short bits of trail through distinctive groves. I was alone throughout, without even passing others on the trail, until I got quite near to the end point of my hike, at the light rail station.
I stood waiting for the train, content and still quite alone, enjoying the stillness that seemed to so completely ‘belong to me’, a sort of distillation of satisfaction, contentment, and ease that felt rather similar to post-coital bliss in some way that I found mildly unsettling, and therefore also somewhat amusing. More than “okay right now” – I even felt “happy”. 🙂
There were verbs involved… some that needed doing, some that needed to be discontinued.
I wonder if I’ve learned anything? I wonder what today holds? I wonder if my second cup of coffee will be better – and I wonder if I’ll care if it isn’t? Today is a good day for wonder. 😉
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Evening Light 