WALDEN IN MUSKOKA MY RETREAT

It’s hard to explain to folks who don’t write, paint or wax poetic, how important it is to have a ready source of inspiration. Like legendary Canadian artist, Tom Thomson, I face a shortfall of inspiration when everything is green and fulfilled. While this isn’t to suggest, as a human being, I’m not enthralled about the woodlands of Muskoka in the spring and summer, it’s the case that autumn and winter are more profoundly diverse and unpredictable. I’ve been a landscape writer all my professional life, and the seasons have been a huge influence on when I write and what I write about. As Thomson complained that Algonquin was too green and plain in the late spring and summer, I too have issues with contrast. As a writer. Not as a path-wandering admirer of nature. I could live in these woods permanently. It’s just that as a creator, I find writing in the midst of an autumn storm, or a winter gale, is so much more rough and jagged around the edges, so many more things happening around the homestead, such as trees banging against the side of the house, hitting the glass pane of my office window.....there are wind-sounds that remind one of the Call of the Wild and inspire the imagination to incorporate ghosts and wee beasties that thrive in such tumultuous times.

My trips into this beautiful Bog I have recently come to call “Walden,” in respect to Thoreau’s own Walden Pond, are fantastic at this time of the year, as the frost has begun painting the hardwood leaves, and the wind has started to tear them away, spiraling them back to earth, to be trodden down by my intrusive travels each day. It is all so amazing. Even as these leaves fall and the solemn days of late fall evolve upon the landscape, it becomes haunting in a passionate, engaging way. We look upon the demise of one season as the birth of another.

I have now just decided it is time to travel the path this morning, long overdue from a walk with the dog before sunrise. I trust I will return with a heightened sense of discovery, as it is seldom I arrive back at this doorstep without something new and exciting to bestow upon you.