Look about with wondering eyes

Wednesday, March 8, 2006 9:20 PM

You'll be suprised what you see.

I am visiting a friend. She has a hiking trail near her house that is several miles long. She's been out on that trail many times but untill two days ago, she'd never stepped off it. It's a very wide, well graded, man made trail. The trees and brambles an bushes are right up against either side but while you are on that trail, you are seperate form them. They are a differnt world.
We went hiking on that trail and it felt wrong to me. Why should we seperate ourselves from nature this way? From the path everything looks dead. Everything feels dead but that isn't so. I know that isn't so. So I suggested that we do a little exploring off the path. She was unsure but up for a go. So we worked our way through the brambles that edge the path with minimal injury and were imediately rewarded with a brilliant spray of crimson amid the brown and the gray. It's a bush that I know as red twig, so named for the vivid color of its bark.
At first it seems like the only color in the whloe place but that's not true. There are some pink and blue roks of that way. And look at these tree branches. There are little buds of green and yellow and red on the ends. And over here, the most unusual little shoots pushing up through the have frozen muck. I wonder what they'll be. There are fantastical shapes formed by the trees. Hollow oaks and spiralling vines and odd places where two trees have become one.
It seems this whole place is a marsh in warmer weather. You could never explore in here in summer with just your tennis shoes and a stick to help you over fallen trees.
She's amazed at all the things I can see. "I need 3 more pairs of eyes" she says. No. Just slow down. Don't look ahead. Look around. Stop and feel the trees, the stones. Feel the dirt between your fingers and don't be afraid to get your feet wet. None of this is dead. It's just sleeping, on the edge of waking.

Now She want's to see and expolre more. She leads the way and finds her own wonders.

Today, we had a picnic on a fallen tree in a place you can't see from outside the woods/marsh. We just sat listening to the birds singing and the ice melting. We felt the whole place coming slowly awake around us. This whole place will be cut off by marsh and muck (and mosquitoes) in the summer, when everything is "alive" and blooming, when most people will think about how beautigul it is.
It's beautiful and alive now. You just have to look.

If you look for wonder and beauty, you will find it. You just have to open your eyes.

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