Child’s Play

Kelee and I went for our first walk since my mishap today. Yesterday the Orthopedist gave me permission to venture out on the Land Grant with a walking stick and some caution. What a revelation! I meandered it with the keen interest of the child, seeing every nook and cranny, every rock, berry, stick and fencepost as the soul-filling inspiration they each are. The air was sweet with the smell of last night’s dusting of snow, bringing the juniper, cedar and pine to full fragrance. Tracks of fox, rabbit, coyote and cat lingered in the shaded areas where the snow still held. And I realized how fully I experience these walks every single day. I am open as a child when I walk out there. I do play. I do lose myself into a meditation as old and natural as time itself. I was brought to this land for this specifically—to set this serious soul deeply free—to offer light to my nature’s darkness—to frolic in ways endemic to me. The freedom I feel out on that land is what I wish for all of us, and a love so deep it has no need to hold but only to cherish. I am led to this land to experience love and I am forever grateful because I don’t know that I could learn it any other way.

Out there today I thought of a lovely Thoreau quote sent by a friend after visiting me here. I offer it along with photos from today’s walk.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, to publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”