Woods Wanderer

With temps hovering around freezing, it hardly feels like spring, but I had a hankering to get outside all the same. I wanted a little bare ground to walk on so I stayed here in the Champlain Valley this morning, leaving the snow-covered mountains for another day. My dog Matika didn’t care where we went as long as we got out of the house.

To my pleasant surprise I found the nearby Rail Trail mostly clear of snow. I hiked down it at a good clip, thoroughly enjoying the traction my boots purchased in the soft gravel underfoot. The few patches of ice that I crossed reminded me how tedious it is getting around in winter – more like skating than walking.

I pressed forward, reveling in the joy of free movement over bare ground. It was something I hadn’t been able to do since last fall. Funny how we miss the simplest things when we can’t do them.

It has been a long, hard winter – one of the coldest in memory. But the remnant snow piles around our driveways are only shadows of their former selves, the days are long now, and the first green shoots of the lilies in front of my house are pushing up through the detritus. Soon the migrating birds will return and the buds of trees will start swelling. Then we’ll all be giddy with vernal delight. It’s inevitable.

Tags: bare ground, seasonal change, signs of spring, walking

What’s the weather like? What’s for dinner? What’s on TV? These are the kind of questions that most people ask themselves nearly every day. As long as I keep to this program, I’m just a regular guy. But I have a tendency to stray. I have a tendency to ask big questions, very big questions – questions for which there are no simple answers.

Last year I completed a manuscript about my immersion into amateur astronomy a decade ago and the big questions that arose from it. At the same time, I read all sorts of theological works, sampling the world’s major religions. The result as been a long winter of intense metaphysical inquiry and difficult writing about things that no one really understands.

Last fall I visited Fisk Quarry and saw the fossilized remnants of creatures that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. Those swirls embedded in rock reminded me of spiral galaxies, hurricanes and other natural phenomena. All this suggests to my impressionable mind that there’s such a thing as natural order, that the patterns I see in the world around me are not just a figment of my imagination. That gets me thinking about why patterns exist.  And that, in turn, gets me thinking about the Absolute.

The great thaw has commenced here in the North Country. Soon I’ll be wandering around the woods looking for spring wildflowers, blathering like a fool about how wonderful and beautiful the world is. Then I won’t be so lost in my abstractions. Then again, everything in nature reminds me of divine order. I see spots on the back of a ladybug, a heavy mist clinging to a forested mountain, or the waxing moon rising after dark and sense the sublime. I’m a hopeless romantic.

Tags: big questions, fossils, metaphysics, natural order, natural philosophy, the sublime, theology, wild nature

As I sit on the side porch, warmed by sunlight beaming though closed windows, it doesn’t seem to me like spring is far away at all. Snow is piled several feet deep in my front yard and around the driveway, but I can see pavement and the icicles hanging down from the roof are dripping constantly. With the thermometer reaching into the 20s, we’re experiencing a heat wave compared to the steady parade of subzero temps last month. That’s encouraging.

It’s March now. The Vernal Equinox is only a few weeks away. And while those of us who have lived here in the North Country a decade or more know better than to start looking for robins, the maple sap should start running soon. Surely that counts for something.

In my driveway there’s a puddle of snowmelt, and in that puddle I see the reflection of a relentless sun. I find stark beauty in that reflection as well as in the craggy, half-melted edges of ice nearby. For those paying attention, and I’m sure the birds at my feeder are doing just that, the early signs of seasonal change are clear. Yes, some nasty winter storms come our way in March, but a big thaw will soon take place regardless.

That’s what is nice about the seasons here in northern New England. Just when you think the heat/cold/rain is never-ending, things change. Nothing lasts so long that it devastates us – not if we pay careful attention. Things change. It’s only a matter of time.

Tags: New England, seasonal change, signs of spring, snowmelt