[ surprise in the unknown, dept. ]
It’s gently raining and the delicate drops flow and tinkle melodiously down the drain pipe near my open window. The light outside is soft wet greens and misty grays; the three story high forest of needled trees fifty feet away wave and beckon me to step out and to step into, nature. We’ll see if that daily walk happens (again) after I finish this little note.
I’m inspired by reality a lot today; there’s surprise and beauty in it, and delight in things new and not known, like the insights shared by Barry Lopez below, for those of us who are variously summoned and invited to take a hike; to deepen inner self-knowing not from words in any book but as it’s stumbled upon when we curiously step outside and enter into the quietude of the inner/outer forest, and the reality of our constantly regenerating self-nature:
“Almost every day I go down to the river with no intention but to sit and watch. I have been watching the river for thirty years, just the three or four hundred yards of it I can see from the forested bank, a run of clear, quick water about 350 feet wide. If I have learned anything here, it’s that each time I come down, something I don’t know yet will reveal itself.
..”When I am by the river, therefore, I am simply there. I watch it closely, repeatedly, and feel myself not apart from it. I do not feel compelled to explain it.”
Only in and from emptiness – empty of identity, of self as ‘me’ – can real beauty, love. peace and joy – be recognized.
Love, and be well. 🙂
~ Watercolor art thanks to Laurel Adams.
