MARCH ARRIVED WITH THE GENTLENESS OF A LAMB
One would be forgiven today, for wandering aimlessly beneath this universal, cloudless, blue canopy of late winter sky. After the dusting of snow over the past few days, this is one of those temptations the watcher in the woods can not resist. The prognosticators are already announcing a particularly early spring, for our region of Ontario, and few of us care to diminish their soothsaying, and have blind trust they’ve picked up their information from natural signs, not simply wishful, fraudulent intent. Might there be profit in good news?
It is true than I can easily become lost in this ethereal, poetic contemplation, taking these crunching steps out into the woods. I can easily take myself away from the work-a-day world, and lose myself in the merging of wonderland and actuality, where dreamers find their ecstasy, but realists measure it all proportionally. Until that is, they find themselves imagining things, as if this portal within nature, even in real terms, has unspecified enchantments that need to be investigated. I’ve always been a realist with an annoying penchant for bending the hard and fast, usurping the logical, and straightforward, just to get a better view.
Escaping here this afternoon at times seems irresponsible, when I think of the many capitalist-chasing projects awaiting my attention with our family business. Yet I know in my heart, that whatever time I steal here now, restoring my heart and soul in such a tranquil spot, will return to me in unfettered, plentiful ambition later on, when the sun goes down and chores are yet to complete. My wife often wonders aloud if I shouldn’t have been a vagabond instead, a hobo, riding the rails to places unknown. I know she’s kidding yet strangely I think about this wanderlust myself, and whether in another life, I was some stalwart navigator racing the high seas, or an adventurer challenging bush, prairie and mountain-side toward some unspecified discovery. We all wonder, from time to time, what we did in a previous existence, if there was one at all. Why do we quest? What truths do we look for, that will make us enlightened. Each of us has a different reason, I think, yet sometimes we cross paths, and wonder silently, if fate has intervened.
Out on this bogside, I cherish being without phone or electronic messenger of any kind, and only a few feet along this path, the frustrations of the day become so insignificant and untimely; a nuisance I can do without......just as a hobo might relate of a profession once that was too demanding and confining. My open rail is this keyboard , when I finally return to my office, overlooking the woodlands......it is no trouble at all then, to settle in this too low chair, at this cluttered, note-posted desk, and feel such excitement about my walk, and what I had seen while outside. It doesn’t have to be a profound experience, in order for me to be able to write again. Rather it has to be the refresher in my day, reminding me that there is nothing at all more important in the world, than this relationship with our nature. It is at our center, our core, and we would subtly diminish to an unremarkable dust without its interplay and cycle, yet our arrogance toward it, means we fail within, what we consider, the vast accomplishments of adaptive mankind.
As I bask in the brilliant light, engulfing this hollow of landscape, above Muskoka Bay, it is impossible to feel removed from the cycle of days, the seasons, this evolution of landscape and atmosphere, so vibrantly electric and powerful. And when I hear the dull, thudding rumble of the earth movers this spring, I will tremble in soul, to think of a place like this, being bulldozed in the name of progress. The painful etching of the urban mantra that crackles with its own inherent horror.... "expansion for the prosperity of us all!" It is then that I wish a great sweeping storm would thunder overhead, and in a great calamity, strike hard against the folly of presumed self-divinity..... warn that desecration to a beautiful world, for the sake of profit, is the work of the false prophet, who cares not for survival of mankind or the environment, but that its exploitations be plentiful and self satisfying. It could only be the damnation of greed that would consume the qualities of earth that sustain us, the hopeless gamble that the alchemy of commerce, will arrive like a thundering cavalry, to save us from our excesses in the end.
My wife asked me one day, after she found me leaning against a sunny tree, while looking out over The Bog quite dreamily, "Are you trying to take root?" I thought about it for several moments, without answering, and with a wee wink of the eye, suggested something like, "Wouldn’t that be something. My fortune however, as has proven many times in the past, would herald the man with the chainsaw to find me all plump and prime, and set about to make me into a window sill or a two by four.....a hockey stick or a bit of flooring in a bathroom.
It is a day with endless possibilities. A day for contemplation and self discovery. It’s a day for youngsters to make the best of the remaining snow, slide on the puddle-ice, and toss a few poorly directed snowballs at innocent bystanders. It’s a day to stay outdoors, bask awhile in some portal away from the still chilled air. And it’s a time to admire nature for what it is......a survivor, a nurturer, a soul-mate, a temptress and an enforcer. It is truth personified. Reality actualized. The contradiction between reality and the supernatural, the poet and the painter, the explorer and the wanderer, and all the mutual satisfaction in between.
We are free to take root if we choose.