happy wandering

My morning travels found me getting lost in a breathtaking place. From the retreat center, Wisdom House in Litchfield, CT, I wandered up the road and in 15 minutes arrived at Topsmead State Forest. 

Stumbling into this experience without any planning was part of its breathtaking nature. Too often, I get lost in planning instead of getting lost in discovering. So tense do I get about the idea of not knowing what I'm doing or where I'm going, that I waste unbelievable time and energy organizing the projected experience in my mind in hopes of increasing the potential for joy (or just satisfaction) for my senses. The thing I notice about this habit is that even when I finally get to the experience, I'm already on the other side of it, I'm not actually present - I've already lived the experience in the virtual reality of my imagination.

Wandering into and through life as it's unfolding invites me to open my senses rather than think that I already 'know' the experience in my mind. I am alive, more engaged in real time. I have a child-like innocence and enthusiasm for the revelation.

What I discovered this morning was aliveness throughout the forest and meadows, aliveness in the buzzing of creatures, aliveness in the invisible strands of spider webs suspended with the great weight of water, aliveness in the damp earth pulsing with potential, and aliveness in my ankles as the dew tickled my skin.

Without planning, Life may reveal itself to me and I may reveal myself to Life. Such revelation can only happen if I'm willing to be alive, awake, and risk being lost. Here's a poem for my morning wandering from Mary Oliver.

Sleeping in the Forest

I thought the earth

remembered me, she

took me back so tenderly, arranging

her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds. I slept

as never before, a stone

on the riverbed, nothing

between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated

light as moths among the branches

of the perfect trees. All night

I heard the small kingdoms breathing

around me, the insects, and the birds

who do their work in the darkness. All night

I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling

with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.