As I walk in good company

"A sense of Mystery can take us beyond disappointment and judgment to a place of expectancy. It opens in us an attitude of listening and respect. If everyone has in them the dimension of the unknown, possibility is present at all times. . . Knowing this enables us to listen to life from the place in us that is Mystery also. Mystery requires that we relinquish an endless search for answers and become willing to not understand. . . Perhaps real wisdom lies in not seeking answers at all. Any answer we find will not be true for long. An answer is a place where we can fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question. After all these years, I have begun to wonder if the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company."

~ from MY GRANDFATHER'S BLESSINGS, by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

That's the kind of medical doctor I will listen to.

("Beloved," gouache and watercolor by am from the late 1980s or early 1990s, my late 30s or early 40s. The words in the painting are a poem I wrote when I was 17 years old, in December of 1966)

Walking Through the Fertile Land of Memory and Forgiveness

"There are some good things to be said about walking. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated and anyone can transport himself anywhere, instantly. Big deal, Buckminster. To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me."
- Edward Abbey

Thanks to Whiskey River

Walking toward Bellingham Bay in Marine Park in Bellingham, Washington:






















("Walking Through the Fertile Land of Memory and Forgiveness," gouache and watercolor, by am, from the 1990s)

Listening /Looking up and seeing crows in the cottonwood trees during the snowy days last week

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)

The snow is gone for now. Snow never lasts very long in the lowlands of the Pacific Northwest. I'm grateful for that. I will walk four miles in the snow but that's all. When the snow is gone, I walk freely again, but it always takes a little time to get my sense of well-being back. Something about snow pulls the rug out from underneath my usually good spirits.

The day after Thanksgiving 2011 / Walking in the sunshine

In the first 20 minutes of a 40-minute walk in the rain, before circling back home

During that 40 minutes, I didn't see many people out walking. Two young women jogging on my way out and two young women with infants in strollers with plastic coverlets on my way back.

At the beginning of a 40-minute walk in Whatcom Falls Park yesterday morning

"All my life I have been haunted by the fascinating questions of creativity. Why does an original idea in science and art "pop up" from the unconscious at a given moment? What is the relation between talent and the creative act, and between creativity and death? Why does a mime or a dance give us such delight? How did Homer, confronting something as gross as the Trojan War, fashion it into poetry which became a guide for the ethics of the whole Greek civilization?"

(from the preface to The Courage to Create, by Rollo May)

We shall walk

Listen.