A Hill Walking Poem Part One: In Nature

In simple earnest, I never found myself alone within the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit courses, drives, and eddies like a leaf in Autumn. A wild activity, of thoughts, imagina- tions, feelings, and impulse of motion rises up from within me. Samuel Taylor Coleridge The journey I am taking today is not a journey planned by unsleeping Fate. My adventure begins in the fluctuating space of Romance, and continues in the time frame of Chance. I must keep wandering, like the opening allegro of a symphony, across widening circles that briefly enclose me before nudgiong me elsewhere. Even if I remember a place from a past trek, it is still an elsewhere in this moment. This was once a mystery, but no more. I embrace paradox... I pass neither exits nor entrances: it is just a long road which bends back on itself through fields of bright greeen foliage of summer's steady growth. In the distance I see farmers tending their crops, coaxing growth out of rich soil, the land's bounty given with prodigal abandon by the Earth Spirit. A haze separates me from that work and service. I trudge outward, reaching a place of hills rolling across grasslands. I climb and descend three of them, with the tallest, the second, giving me a vista of pathless fields which farmers manuever with ease. But my mission is elsewhere, always elsewhere, away from settled homes and settled lives. I enter a zone of more spacious grasslands with groves of trees rising above them, as if they were islands in a green sea. I pause. Keeping very still, I watch deer grazing at the edge of a woods, birds landing, pecking at the ground, then launching into flight, squirrels and rabbits making their sudden entrances and exits, a lone fox lying in a pool of sunlight. I slowly let myself slip to the ground, and sit with my back against a dead tree. I doze, at first fitfully, my sleep interrupted by a faint inner summons to hike while the day is young, but to no avail: I simply sink into a deeper sleep, and imagine I am dreaming, or dream I am imagining. Either way it is a poem taking form, discovering itself in the stillness within and without. When I awake I rejoice in the open air, swirling around me in gentle waves. Oh, blessed open air! And the stillness without envelops me. I build a small fire, and prepare a cup of black tea Marsha pounded into a powder for my trip. The taste of the tea is complex: it reminds me of people indoors, groups of peole in conversation, friends and strangers talking, laughing. behaving as one - all alike. But I embrace this solitude and desire only to lengthen it, stretch myself within it. I let my soul emerge from its body cell into the open air where it blends with Nature: the sounds of rushing water and the wind rushing over the grasses, the touch of breezes like a caress or winds like a slap, the smell of growth and decay which is one smell when I trust my senses, the sights that turn my eyes into beacons that illuminate this beauty, my eyes looking without and within and seeing, truly seeing, they are the same reality. Is it for this awareness I am alive? Is this the elsewhere I seek, my mission's goal?