Born with a weak heart

I don't mind exploring along the same paths for the rest of my life though, of course, they never are the same. To walk along these mountain ridges, drift down beside the streams among the cedar, pine and fir, and out to the willows and sand of the larger shore around which they have all come to stand. With repetition, the steps layer over one another in memory, gathering with them all that was seen and coloring what came before.  Here the purple flowers next to the brittle husks, there the aimless damselflies and glistening needle ice, your sadness, fear and buoyant joy, the worn feathers caught in the brown grass, the perfect, short-lived blue of the crayfish shells turning to pinkish orange in the heat, and the wren singing without cease as the sky changes its colors too under the setting sun.

 To each of these places for which I have an affinity there is, without fail, a spiritual, if not physical, remoteness-- a kind of restless, communal loneliness.  It's there in the Swallows, weaving their arcs through the sky, vanishing into the blue and returning again just as fluidly as if they were the very spirit of the wind, as if their absence in the winter was no more than a longer ebb in their constant turning with its center somewhere even they may not understand.  And maybe it is strange then that one should still see freedom in tethering oneself to the same landscapes when others range so far but the world is always there no matter from where one chooses to watch it.  There are always the hailstorms or the gently falling snow, the cool relief of the lake on a Summer day as overhead the cumulus drifts or later the stratus lets through the shafts of morning light, the wet granite roar of the falls and the evening's glow lingering on the faint ripples at the edge of the water.




 There are things in this world for which I have no defense and others against which I refuse to defend myself.  With each step, they can reach me just as they need to-- in beauty, sadness, and joy.  I suppose that one only really wishes to defend what one loves and that my love has always turned itself outward.  So then what does one do with a Killdeer's fretful call from somewhere not seen, the searching tap of a nuthatch high above, nighthawks gliding over the sand unconcerned with our presence in the dimming light, the first and last Red Wings of the season bristling up in the same song, little shadows of birds shivering up out of the beach grass to disappear into the willows, a hen harrier skimming low and hungry over the reeds, and the tiny scattering of olive and gray feathers, loose and drifting in the dust of the mountain trail?  I don't know how to keep these things safe unless it's to keep them alive within, let them join together with the old, and build with each new outing.  So I try to remember to follow the course of things in faith as witness and to give myself over to the world and all of the ways to pass through it.  The paths are largely the same even if my steps and the life around them have changed and thankfully, more often than not, I tend to know my way home.