Natural Day

Yesterday evening I was tired, and laid down on the floor in the front room for a while.   Even with eyes closed, I sensed the slowly fading light, and it carried me with it.   A few times consciousness came back to surface and I thought of getting up.  But my body was very heavy, the light a little dimmer, and it seemed natural to end my day with the turning Earth.

I began the day with an early walk down to the park for yoga in an open, grassy area.  There was moisture in the air, mist perhaps, but the lightest imaginable.  I practiced for about forty minutes, enjoying the spacious feeling, the birds that flew by, and the squirrel leaping through the tree in front of me.

Then I went home for breakfast, changed, and went back to the park for a two hour work party removing non-native invasive plants.  Our focus was garlic mustard, but I worked on whatever appeared in my path - wineberry, oriental bittersweet, honeysuckle, English ivy - feeling my mind tuning in to the shapes, patterns, and subtle color variations by which I recognize the plants to leave, and the ones to remove.  I came across a couple of deer, and after initially startling them, moved around them so they could stay in the corner of the park they had picked for the day.

After lunch, Pam and I drove seventeen miles north to Montgomery County's Rachel Carson Conservation Park.  I had just learned about it, and thought it would be interesting to explore.  It's a large area, over 600 acres, with meadow, forest, and a stream.  It has trails for hiking and horses, but compared with other places we've been, is very lightly used.  We wandered the trails for an hour and a half, enjoying the natural state of the place, hearing the hammering of woodpeckers and the rush of water, far enough from subdivisions and roads to feel a little wild, a hint of what the mid-Atlantic region was like before the modern human invasion.

This morning, I'm still feeling the effects of yesterday's nature overdose - more interested in feeling the breeze, watching for a bird, seeing the sunlight dappling the forest floor - than in the things on the list I had planned to do.