Spend enough time in the woods and you develop a sense of whether it’s a bird or a deer or even a snake, and it happens before you can even turn your head to see.
Even when the weather is bad, I go out to wander and make pictures for thirty or forty minutes. Every working day, this is my lunchtime habit, a recursive practice that is exercise for both my body and my mind.
Sand below us, water in front of us, the great mountain sitting huge in the blue haze to our right.
This kind of rest is a sort that must be earned, in that it only exists on the far side of intense focus. It is found only after the work is done.
Over time, stacks of these fragments string together and hang upon the backdrop from which they were extracted.
We lingered there for a time, suspended in the moment, before continuing on, enjoying the snails and mushrooms in the undergrowth, the swaying of the forest canopy, and the trickling of a hillside stream.
If you find yourself at an intersection with a choice between roads that seem equal, choose your bath based on something specifically arbitrary. Choose the street with the sauntering cat, for example, or the one with the yellow house.
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