On Mist and the Magic of Just Listening

I don't even know where to begin. Was it the way the sun shone across late afternoon yesterday? The way Noah jumped on my stomach this morning. There was something with more flight, more lift, something of an effervescence.

I know I raced too quickly through my favored landscape, where route 117 skirts the boundaries of Maynard and Sudbury and Concord and Lincoln. But I did see the bursting buds of the silver maple, there will be leaves any day now. I have seen the reddening of the whole maple spectrum. And the yellowing of the willows. Even the poplar have a distinct pre-leaf hue. I have seen these. I needed to remember that looking and remembering also required writing. That was my task today. I haven't the time these days. But I needed to begin, and with that spark, those signs, the lifting, I did.

With the wending of conversations that carried a class through a day of discovery. Where the quiet of the forest reminded urban dwellers that they belong in ways they sometimes forget. Through Walden Woods. A tall stand of pine trees, a late adolescent forest of oak and maple and birch. Many shorter pines, just waiting. Well worn paths, but youth in complete silence, practicing contemplation. Remembering what they knew perfectly in their infancy.

Today the mist rolls across the land. The colors are darker greens and greys that remind one of mold and lichen, the oldest life forms. It is a moist smelling forest where ground pine jump to life and pine saplings turn their bark into photosynthesis devices. The season of resurrection, rebirth is well under way. Everywhere, the tongues of grasses and flowers slip up from within the earth into the warmth of sunlight. Everywhere, life.

We will win as we are righteous in our ways. No more finding fault with others without the sincerity of our own devotion. I will scramble and race to assure that truth is a regular expression, that it lifts us and enhances our truest gift, the knowledge of wildness.

"In Wildness is the preservation of the world." Henry David Thoreau, "Walking"