I love Shel Silverstein. I have never wanted to punch a character in a story more than the boy in his book, “The Giving Tree.” (as he gets older, not when he was a kid). I had a hard time reading it to the girls because the boy just takes and takes and blows off the tree, and never gets it. My blood is boiling a bit now just thinking about it. But Silverstein couldn’t describe humankind in our time any better.
I aspire to a more complementary relationship to the trees in my life (I get the irony of having a wooden skateboard in the photo). Over the past several years, a particular tree stands out. It’s an Osage Orange tree on the shoreline of the Oxford Cemetery. I have made a point of sitting under it for some time now.
Of late, rest has been hard to come by. At lease the right kind of rest. Rest, for me, is about tuning out the constant demands of what is coming up, and being completely in the moment. It’s when time doesn’t matter and actually passes differently. It’s not the kind of rest that comes from sitting on a couch or sleeping at night. Frequently, it comes from being outside–hiking, walking, skateboarding, reading, bird watching, exploring, kayaking, paddleboarding, reading or writing. I haven’t had enough of that time, those moments lately, and I can tell.
When I rest is when I am open to wonder. When I rest, gratitude overflows–in part because I am not rushing to the next thing. I am not in a hurry.
Thursday morning, I fought the pull of the couch and hit Oxford Conservation Park with longboard, binoculars, and notebook. “Skatebirding” has become a new favorite thing to do. I skated to the cemetery and pulled up under my “Sitting Tree.”
Double-drop longboards make for great birding seats. As I sat to clear my head, think, pray, and take in the morning, a raft of ducks was just off the shore. Watching them move about as a group, they were doing what ducks do. And what is it that people do in that way? What is it that is natural to us, that puts us in a place of doing what we should be doing?
Beyond Mallards, Canvasbacks, and Wood Ducks, I don’t know all the duck types around by first sight. Watching them and checking Cornell’s Merlin App, I pegged them as Ruddy Ducks, but pinged a birding expert friend to make sure. As I watched them, time moved differently. A solo Bufflehead swam up to the Ruddies a couple times, thinking they were his peeps, and then both times flew away skimming the water in a hurry when he realized they weren’t.
These are not my photos, they are from bird ID sites, but the top left is a Bufflehead and the others are male and female non-breeding Ruddy Ducks.
It was the tree, the ducks, the cove, the breeze, the sunrise, the shoreline, and I got to be a part of it. Sitting there, gratitude and joy welled up and started coming out of my eyes. I know I can’t communicate it, but maybe you’ve had moments like that.
Skating back to the conservation park, I wanted to write all this down–something I haven’t been doing enough of except chicken scratch in notebooks.
We’re looking headlong into the holidays. It’s a busy time of year, it’s nighttime dark at 5:30pm and it’s getting colder. Mornings like yesterday remind me that I need to rest. And to rest, I need to get outside. The Sitting Tree is still there. Where am I?
I didn’t find Big Foot. Or an Indigo Bunting, for that matter, but neither of those things is the point. It’s about searching. More than that, it’s about being out there, and being grateful.
September has been a month of making the most of weekends and doing things that I’ve been wanting/meaning to do for some time. Earlier in the month, the girls and I drove to Asheville, NC, to catch up with friends who moved there three years ago. We hiked, played in streams, visited some breweries (not the girls), sat on decks and caught up, and I even got a happy hour, back porch haircut. It was a great reminder to stay connected to good friends and change the scenery.
After a spring and summer at home and working, September made for a second opportunity to do something different. I stumbled across the C&O Canal Trust. The canal and tow-path are so close to home and so cool–we would occasionally run along it for cross country practice at St. James School, and then I got a 26.3-mile taste of it as part of the JFK 50-Miler more than a decade ago. Future adventures will include staying in canal houses, but in this case, the Trust website pointed me towards canal towns. And in particular, to Shepherdstown, WV, the former stomping grounds of a friend, artist, and mentor of mine. And the weekend assembled itself upon finding Sundogs Bed & Breakfast.
I can’t sing enough praise about Shepherdstown or Sundogs.
Shepherdstown is a college town that reminds me of Chestertown, MD, here on the Shore, but if you put it in the West Virginia mountains. It’s cool, funky, with shops, cafes, restaurants, theaters, a weekend farmer’s market, all built around Shepherd University. And as cool towns do, Shepherdstown has a get-lost-in independent bookstore in Four Seasons Books. It’s still COVID time, there aren’t any sort of gatherings or events going on, and masks were the norm and required to go in anywhere.
For us, looking for a weekend to unplug, unwind, and recharge, it was more about being outside than in town, and Sundogs hit the spot.
When one of your B&B hosts is a horticulturalist who has designed and revitalized gardens for Dumbarton Oaks, The American Horticultural Society River Farm and George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate, you can bet you are in for something incredible.
It’s maybe a 4 to 5-mile drive out of town, to a 46-acre retreat with trails running all over the property. The five rooms are named after dogs that the owners have rescued, and it’s a dog-friendly inn. Small B&Bs reflect the character, passions, and interests of the owners, and a horticulturalist who designs gardens and a NOAA meteorologist, who are both conservationists, animal rescuers, and fix vegetarian breakfasts for their guests in the morning.
Holly and I spent early mornings with coffee literally surrounded by hummingbirds, reading and bird watching, before hiking trails late mornings and early afternoons. I’m not much of a birder, but the list of birds I saw includes: Goldfinches, hummingbirds, Nuthatches, Tufted Titmice, Cardinals, Red-Bellied Woodpeckers, Downy Woodpeckers, Eastern Bluebirds, Carolina Wrens, Cormorants, Pileated Woodpecker, Red-Shouldered Hawks, and Cedar Waxwings.
Shepherdstown and Sundogs are both places I hope to return to. Which brings me to Indigo Buntings, birds that are around Sundogs, and I am sure were around us. It’s a common enough bird, even on the Eastern Shore where we live, I’ve just never really gotten good eyes on one (I may have seen one fly across the road into the woods while I was driving in Caroline County, it was the right blue, but I can’t count that).
We spent some time at Sundogs searching for Buntings, but not much time. We tried to learn and listen for the song, and walked the edge of the woods and trees in the field where they are often seen. But didn’t make it the focus of the weekend. Nor have I made it too big a focus of watching birds–just something that will be cool when it happens.
What it requires to be ‘in search of’ something is to be out there, to show up, to make the attempt, and that means something. A few years ago, I wrote about being in search of the Snow Bunting (Buntings are a theme), and so much of what I wrote there still stands. It’s more about being tuned in, mindful, and grateful for the search and for the experience. What it means is to get out in nature, to look around, to keep my bird feeders filled and notice who shows up.
As we gear up for fall, there are a number of adventures I am gearing up for, some physical, some mental, some spiritual.
One adventure coming this fall that has been more than a decade in the making is skateboarding the 26-mile Western Maryland Rail Trail in and around Hancock, MD. A friend read about the paved trail when we first found long distance longboarding/skateboarding, it’s just never materialized into an adventure. We’re looking to change that in early fall, likely with a camping/backpacking element to make the most of the trip.
The Western Maryland Rail Trail (WMRT) is a 26 mile long paved trail that stretches from a mile west of historic Fort Frederick State Park in Big Pool, Maryland to its western terminus at the Potomac River in Little Orleans, Maryland.
Spectacular river views, vistas of hardwood covered mountains exploding with color in the fall, rock formations, dramatic tunnels, transportation history and pristine wilderness all within a few hours drive from Washington, DC, Baltimore, MD and Pittsburgh, PA.
The WMRT is perfect for hiking, biking, inline skating (rollerblading) or, weather permitting, cross country skiing. One excellent feature is that the entire trail is handicap accessible. The trail is especially suited to families, novice cyclists (it’s almost completely flat), and for anyone seeking a pleasant, leisurely ride.
Biking is the most popular use of the WMRT, with 26 miles of paved trail. The excellent western section follows the rugged mountain terrain west of Hancock, offering great views of the Potomac and surrounding mountains, and no interstate noise!
The more time I spend skateboarding, the more I realize, for me, it’s not about doing crazy tricks or accomplishing epic trips that are hard to pull off–it’s about being outside, having fun, skating with friends, with wheels rolling on pavement. In the spirit of being “in search of,” it’s a way of being in search of fun/stoke that only requires you to do it in order to find it.
Adventures of the mind can happen daily. And as a book nerd, those are journeys I look forward to every morning with my coffee. And there is something just cool about mind adventures with a group of fellow readers. We’ve had group reads of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” (some actually finished that doorstop of a tome), and some of Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon,” which also involved hiking to find Mason Dixon markers.
This fall’s first literary journey was inspired by the trailer for the forthcoming movie Dune. A fairly common view is that Frank Herbert’s epic novel is the best science fiction novel ever written. And I’ve never read it. So we have a group of five of us (so far, two of whom are English teachers, which speaks to the book being literarily legit) who are making the journey through the book. I am a little over 100 pages in, and I am looking for more time to read because it has pulled me in already. I am sure there will be more to come on this front. After Dune, I have been really looking forward to Robert Macfarlane’s “Underland.”
Another adventure of the mind and heart I have begun is reading and learning about Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Bendectine monk, who along with Thomas Merton, has been a big part of conversations in the Buddhist-Christian dialogue (for which Br. David was given Vatican approval in 1967). Through this pandemic time I have been a big fan of “A Network for Grateful Living,” without knowing much about its founder. Much more to come about Br. David. For any who would like to watch, here is a conversation he had with Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh about gratefulness. Each of them glow and laugh and remember, as if they were gratitude personified.
“We were doing peace, not demanding peace… If you are not able to be be peaceful and happy in every step, a peace march is not a peace march.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
The kind of “in search of” that is common to all of these things, is that to search, I have to show up. I have to be an active participant. And that is where the adventure is. Adventures in life, of the mind, and in gratitude.
2019 is a blank page with a big box of Crayola crayons spread out around it. I dig the above photo that Caroline Phillips took on one of the last days of December, on assignment for Shore Monthly Magazine. It’s sunrise, with friends doing something we love, up and outside early that let us catch a crisp, clear morning to laugh, skate, and reconnect.
2019 is a year I don’t have a clue about in many ways. And part of that not knowing is that the past four-plus years have been foundation building.
Life has a way of pulling the rug out from under us when we get comfortable. I like to think that happens because we are getting comfortable in a way that is keeping us from where we need to be; where we could be going; what we could be doing. But that perspective likely only comes with some distance when we’re looking back.
When we get displaced, we try to get our footing–spiritually, mentally, and physically. We try to put our pieces back together in a meaningful way. We look for that place where we can breathe deeply and be ourselves. We look for somewhere we can build, and re-build our lives.
Over the past four years, I’ve lived in three different places and I’m in the first house where it feels like home, where the girls and I can be for a while, put some roots down and figure out where life goes as Anna gets closer to graduating high school and Ava finishes middle school.
The thing about building a foundation or putting down roots (choose your metaphor) is that that’s the beginning work, the base. For that to amount to anything, you’ve got to build something awesome, grow or bloom into something that no one else can–that’s what each of us has in us. And that’s what 2019 feels like it’s calling for–personally, professionally, physically, creatively–it’s time to stretch, to grow, to build, to do something more; something cool, fun, inspiring. The stuff the God puts each of us here to do.
Field guides, existing colors in the box of Crayolas that we get to color our lives with, to help show us what is possible, what’s been drawn, and what we can do.
Writing about Jorge Luis Borges, introducing Borges’ book, “Dreamtigers,” Miguel Enguidanos talks about dreams and song. That it is our capacity to dream and sing that “makes the world bearable, habitable; they make the dark places bright… Dreams and song. About the whole and the parts. About the universe and about each of its separate creatures.” And that “in spite of incompetence, stumblings, and disillusionment,” that our dreams, played out in the song we choose to sing with our lives can connect and resonate with others.
I guess that’s my hope for 2019. To feel our dreams and find and sing our song in new, surprising, inspiring, and wonder-filled ways. And in doing so, to help others do the same with theirs.
