Loose Strife

I wasn’t really sleeping last night, so when I started to see sunlight, I got up to take a walk. It was cold out and snowing lightly. The flakes looked light and large. The dusting on the sunken packed snow had a pretty, rough texture that caught the dim light in the dawn. Walking into the woods was easy going. At the creek ford there was a layer of ice on the water and I could see bubbles of air, small leaves and twigs race by beneath it. As I walked up the hill away from the creek the sounds of the water faded and there was only the crunch of my boots in the snow. When I stopped there was utter silence.
Repeatedly I’d take a few steps then just stop, stare into the monochrome scene of tree trunks and snow, and just soak in the silence. It’s these times that I start to really savor the details literally in every direction. A single, soaring hemlock standing among the leafless hardwoods looks unbearably beautiful. The random and infinite variations of branches. The contours of the snow. My footsteps behind me, disappearing into the trees around a turn. Silence is a powerful force.
I have always enjoyed hiking. I can remember so well the many times as a college student in Virginia driving alone towards a weekend camping trip somewhere west in the Appalachians; I can remember so well the swelling feeling in my gut as I left the flat tidewater of Virginia and could begin to see the crests of the Blue Ridge. It was the enormity and the magnificence. It was the reward of an awesome vista after a hard slog. It was the excitement of discovering always new places, new routes, new sights.
But I also remember well a hike I once took with a graduate student friend in California years later. He was an older student who had already spent some time battling cancer. I liked to think that because of his experience, he was never in a hurry. We set out for a hike of several miles, but walked maybe less than one in more than hour. It seemed that every plant, every slug or bug, every odd or curious sight has us spending minutes to look, to talk, to digress. My friend wasn’t meticulous in his observations, haughty or annoying in his comments, or even particularly knowledgeable. He was just inspired by the small things everywhere and loved to follow where nature and conversation, intertwined, led us.
And so I stood in the woods this morning and thought of that time. And I soaked in the silence. And I stared at the beauty of a woods that was in every respect absolutely unremarkable. And I cried for a long while and savored it all.