Songs of the Northwest Woods

Enter The Path

The Path

Rover and rambler
Into the woods I travel
Along a path, treading
Sometimes in company
But always listening
Sensing the noise of beauty
Life words singing out
Notes of nature
Deep and lasting
Music for my spirit

Another path, another adventure

The Songs of the Northwest Woods begins with The Path. The path I take on my daily rambles through the woods is fairly worn. Cedar needles cover it along the edges. Some places I see the remnants of twigs and branches, but the center is dark soil that is compacted by the years that I and others have trudged on it. A couple of mounds, jumps for bicycles, rise suddenly. They are wearing smooth, beaten down by rain and use. Salal, wild rose and a few relatively young Douglas firs mark the spot where I enter the deep wood. Just before the rise of the path is the friendly fence of a neighbor and a bevy of blackberries. The entry is closeted by the long branches of a cedar as it reaches down to sweep the earth. Blackberries, wild geraniums almost obscure the spot where the path rejoins the road. I am not sure why the entry and exit should be so obscure. It’s almost as if the earth wants to hold back its secrets, keep some sense of mystery. Perhaps the work to find the path makes the trail more precious, the discovery of its treasures more amazing.

Each path that I discover in the Northwest woods and trails, especially in the rapidly urbanizing sectors, seems more rare and desirable than ever before. The path swings wide a door onto a world in which humans again assume humility, proper position and perspective. I become a part of something with no expectation of control or no assumption of power. I am an observer and I am observed. I can share collected points of interest that I see, touch, hear, smell and taste at various moments in time. The seasons and daily weather change the path, just as I change each time that I make the trip. I also change my path by selecting a new one at times. Each one remains unique. Even my familiar jaunt is somehow never the same day to day. My walks in the Northwest woods and the amazing songs that I hear there have become a classroom of discoveries. I continue to attend because the lessons reach down into my soul and lift me up again to face life with all its complications – the human ones, I mean.

“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few, timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to one obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally by Mind-at-Large. This is an experience of inestimable value.” Aldous Huxley