Discovering Nature

Thoreau wrote that morning brings back the heroic ages. I find that I’m much less eloquent about my morning walk the other day. I just enjoyed it. I liked the way the boardwalk zig-zagged mysteriously, and how it straightened out like a runway.

Then it was back into curving mystery.

The trees made another avenue along the meadow.

And bits of color from moss and bracket fungus showed a “land down under” that thrives even in a very chilly April when few leaves seem to want to open.

The eastern towhee was back in the lower meadow, calling out at the start of my early morning walk yesterday: “Drink your tea!”

The robins were busy about their breakfast in the dewy grass.

As I walked, I felt a little dejected that neither of my daughters had taken the opportunity to come along. But it didn’t take long to recognize that in fact I was having a very good time being completely alone.

I thought about a meditation I’d heard recently on the idea that any human artistry has to begin with what’s already created — therefore it has to begin with gratitude. I thought about how I was walking through a work of art, and I did feel grateful.

I’ve said I was alone. Not entirely. I prayed, and so that level of conversation affirmed a companionship. There were plenty of sounds and critters to testify to the community of wild things around me, too: chickadees, kinglets, woodpeckers, chipmunks and squirrels, a ruffed grouse making its sound of a dribbling basketball off in the distance.

My favorite parts were the times I stood still and waited. In one of those listening times, a silent, shivering oven bird showed herself.

A little farther along and I reached a favorite spot. The green along this stream, and the glittering reflections, invited me to linger and think.

A short climb, and I reached the upper meadow.

More birds here, including flickers…

…and many a chattering goldfinch.

This demure song sparrow rustled quietly in a bush next to me.

And a rabbit briefly considered whether I was to be trusted before beating a hasty retreat.

I was thinking about developments in my life — decisions made, attitudes held — when I turned around to survey the view behind me and saw what seemed a perfect picture of Frost’s “Road Not Taken“:

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The poem’s last two lines are the ones usually quoted, but they are really spoken tongue-in-cheek. The speaker has just told us that he had trouble deciding which path to take because both were worn “about the same.” The difference was slight. But he knew he’d look back and try to read more significance into the choice he’d made. In any case it seemed a fitting sight, and a fitting allusion, just at that moment. I’d already passed both “roads” and was looking back, as the poem does.

Thoreau says (in “Walking”) that a person has no business walking if they are preoccupied with their thoughts:

…it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is; I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

I was guilty of this. Yet there was much, still, that I noticed and enjoyed. There is something about knowing that life independent of me is busy all around that sets me free from trying to keep track of everything, and allows me to hear the inner voice. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I stayed out for several hours — almost long enough to grow moss and lichen, like some of the trees.