Boots on the Trail

“The present is who I am, just the way I am right now. And it is precious.” Spencer Johnson, The Precious Present.

This Memorial Day weekend, with boots on the trail, we experienced the precious present. For the first time, during this COVID-19 quarantine we were allowed to hike the local parks.

In Carlsbad, CA. we’re fortunate, we have a 110-acre, picturesque hiking spot, Calavera Hills Nature Preserve.

The morning was crisp and cool; the sky blue with patches of fluffy white clouds overhead. Once we hit the trail, a quiet solitude came over me: my mind began to wander, and my senses took flight.

Sounds - sights, and smells. The rhythm of my hiking poles tapping the rocks, the plodding of my boots against the good earth, the whistling of the birds, the trickle of running water, and the sweet smells of the grass. My mind recalling bits and pieces of words that expressed my gratitude for the experience. I wanted desperately to write them down but was driven to just to keep walking, no hurry, just calm, rhythmic steps forward.

So, this morning, the question was, “How to put all this into words?”

This compelled me to reach for an old book from my library, Walden by Henry David Thoreau and I read the following passage:

“When we perceive sights, sounds, and textures, we are not standing as disembodied consciousness apart from a world of inanimate mechanisms; rather, we are sentient beings immersed in the sensory world, learning the “essential facts of life” only through “the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.” (Walden).

The perception of truth “produces a pleasurable sensation, a healthy and refined nature would always derive pleasure from the landscape.” (Thoreau’s Journal).

Well said, sir - the truth is timeless. And what better way to express gratitude than to honor and share the wisdom of those who came before us in recognition.

Another timeless philosopher that expressed the present so well was Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay Self-Reliance he said,

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”

“The power which resides in him is new in nature and none, but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.” – Emerson

So, my listening friends, as our confinement is slowly lifted take time to get outdoors and like so many before you get your boots on the trail.

This is Patrick Ball. Thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.

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