Category Archives: Nature

One of the pleasures of ambling to no point lies in what you see on the side, and, on this day, along this known trail in Concord, where the footing’s easy, I am watching what’s a few feet either side of me. The leaves are thick on the ground, and they’ve put my mind to what falls; once there, I begin making note of all the larger fallen tree parts – the limbs, the feather-fingered twigs, the reminder trunks. They are, of course, everywhere. Life, they all say, is migration to earth. At least it is after the arcing rise of considering the sky.

Each step lands easily, and for this time, gravity and I are at equilibrium – I am kept snugly to this path and allowed the river-pace of walking. The trees, patient by my standards, press up, hold up the sky; or, after all their lifetime’s work, lie angled, waiting to decay, then go up again. My looped walk will tend horizontal toward home; their looped lives go up and down a vertical plane.

I shy from geometrics, even as the patron spirit of this and many other walks, Henry Thoreau, was a measure-man of the keenest appreciation and degree. What he made of the intersecting planes of humans and nature fills page after page, and takes on explicit consideration in some of his meditations on seeing (perhaps being?) for moments here and there two ways at once.

Any number of planar passages from Walden come to mind. Often they take place on the “intermediate” water, where looking down on a quiet day like this gets reflection of what’s above:

A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across it by the steaks or flakes of light. It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps, look down on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it. Thoreau, Walden

My eye catches on the remainder of a root-ball, and I pull over. Some of the curves are as smooth as a Brancusi. Getting down to essence. And, satisfyingly, there is even mystery in the little cave at center. It doesn’t take – perhaps you do this too – long for me to begin seeing life forms, and talking quietly follows along. I’m not talking specifically with a tree’s remainder, more mumbling in the forest. It’s my form of witness, of appreciation in a mute world, or one whose language is so slow that I live a whole life between its words.

I’m not on the water, but I have reached some intermediate plane where time’s not ticking in its increments.

And so a while goes by – who knows how long or what was said – and then the itchiness of habit draw me back to my plane, and I set out again, measured steps, bound for next, bound too for home.

Slowly slowly the old root-ball readies itself for another reach at the sky.