It was as if someone lowered pup and I into a glass of milk. We were walking on the dirt trail up on the ranch in the rain. It was foggy but it became so dense the trees were but ghosts guarding a world of chirping and dripping.
Creepy you say? Not a tinge. Comforting and soothing, spring curled up at our sleep, succumbing to incessant and much needed rain. It’s the place where you hear birds and become aware of how little you know past that. Birds? Yes, but which kind? What’s the song about? Are you part of the landscape enough for them not to worry over you, or are you the intruder that rudely converts the sweet morning tunes into alarm sounds? Not that you’d notice…
To call it deafness would be inaccurate. It’s complicit ignorance… to the world that does not require us to know but what a gift towards becoming better versions of ourselves if we do. It is striking that the average person taking a stroll through the woods knows so little about what they see or hear.
Delicate stems of grasses that might as well be invisible for how little we know of what they are and why they’re there, wildflowers so pretty that we perhaps take photos of but do not take the thought far enough to learn their names… Trees with lives so mysteriously and beautifully intertwined with ours; trees that many (most?) of us call but trees, and go maybe as far as divide them into coniferous and deciduous, leaving way too much into the realm of ‘one day I will know more…’ because really, the day is today. That is all we have.
What then? Take a long enough breath to feel tingly all over and grateful beyond words for being able to so do. Make it so that you learn one thing on any given day, about the world so humbly laid at your feet you forget to give it thanks for providing the very ground you step on, a solid one. For the way it is mysteriously draped from the sky all over to where your lungs and eyes can be satiated without even you realizing it.
Save your sense of wonder. Save it from the daily rush, save it from careless gazing upon things you might not even notice after all, and save it from becoming uprooted in any way. We’re born with a sense of wonder; when we first touch the world our senses are steeped into all that the world has to offer, and then at some point – you’d be right to ask why and where, therein lies the trouble – we steer away from it.
Truth is, it’s still within, all of it. All it takes is silence punctuated with bird songs, rain dripping cold and soothing on your face, slipping on a patch of mud just enough to almost step on a delicate ring of flowers you then go and learn the name of… it’s all there. Pup and I keep finding that out. You do it too, why not?