Nature walk

Setting:

• cloudy and dark
• ice fog
• river bend
• warm winter day

Sounds:

• dog sniffing
• whacking of wood on wood
• crunching  snow underfoot
• cars from nearby road

Colours:

• white
• grey
• ochre
• red
• brown

Discoveries:

• three black feathers
• three little mammal holes
• large hollows in the snow, grouped in threes or fours, on the deer trails.  Deer overnight?
• nature repairs moods
• nature repairs a strained relationship
• large cocoon
• small stars pretending to be seeds

I fought the urge to brighten these photos, for it was the urge to get out despite the heave skies, the delight in the colours found, the freedom within the grey that delighted me. With brightness, it would have been a lie, a fake experience that implied our real walk wasn’t good enough.  It was.  Dark despite the fact that it was 3:00, it still changed my mood and his.

He didn’t want to go.  “Nature walk?” he moaned.  “Just ten minutes?” I begged. “My soul is just yearning to get out of the city.”  “Oh, alright,” he said with heaving sighs.

Ten minutes multiplied.  Ten minutes would have been happily more than an hour if we had not had a time constraint.

“Now, consider what a culpable waste of intellectual energy it is to shut up a child, blessed with this inordinate capacity for seeing and knowing, within the four walls of a house, or the dreary streets of a town.” Charlotte Mason

Of course, I wonder why she wrote ‘child’ when ‘human’ would have been true.

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