Behold the Stars

I recently discovered a hiking trail that begins about two miles from my front door. It runs about three-and-a-half miles from the trail head, meanders through the wooded space behind several office buildings and twice crosses under a highway. If I’m so inclined, and I don’t mind fighting the beast of a hill between my house and the trail, I can pass a couple of hours in the “wilderness.”

The trail follows the creek bed so that as I walk I see mostly trees and hills, but is near enough the highway that the whoosh of automobiles periodically invades my awareness — more or less depending on traffic.  I want to say that, given its proximity to civilization, the trail seems to be trying to avoid all contact with man,but I know it isn’t the trail that is avoiding man, but the men and women who walk it. I am one of them.

In this dry season I am privy to sights that will be hidden once the rains begin.   The shallowness of the creek allows me to cross without getting wet and exposes four or five small waterfalls.  At one point, a rotting swing hangs over a shallow swimming hole cut from layered limestone.  At another, the creek twists like rope in twin stone channels before dropping into a shallow pool.  I imagine a Hill Country Robert Frost writing of the eternal journey of these worn-rock channels — side-by-side, but never touching. This isn’t New Hampshire, but Nature’s lessons are universal.

When the rains do come, there will be no point searching for my favorite spots; the rising water level will obscure them, and I will be forced to take alternate paths appropriate to the new season. I won’t be able to cross the creek bed at will, but will need to search out low spots and large stones for crossing.  The small waterfalls will be covered, but the flow over the larger ones will be dramatic. The swimming holes will be deep and pure under fresh ropes swinging from the trees, and the twin channels will be lost beneath the smooth, rushing of the creek.

My days work like that. What seems to be a clear and consistent path changes with the seasons of my life. Things I was so sure of yesterday don’t apply today, and favorite things come and go. We say, “The only thing constant is change,” and snicker at the cliche — but it is true. It took me a long time to really understand and accept that. Learning from experience may be the slow and painful way, but it’s terribly effective.

Walking provides me an antidote to to-do lists, bills, and the other clutter of my life — but only if I let it. It is easy to become the protagonist in my own little Wagnerian opera or waste an entire walk honing the witty, yet cutting thing I should have said in yesterday’s argument.   But if I’m careful, a walk in the woods, like meditation, can be lesson in awareness, a chance to turn off the internal dialogue an pay attention to the world as it is, without the endless nouns and adjectives of my busy mind, and relearn what I already know.

Make a great day.