Moving On

Ben was exhausted yesterday after our hike up Table Mountain. He was content to sit beside me on the couch through the evening, to dream of deer watching from the heights, to disappear over the rocks at the top.

How could my two dogs be approaching middle age now, after such a short time? It hardly seems right, that these two that seemed the embodiment of youth, that rubbed off on me, are now slowing down some. It breaks my heart. In a few years I will take shorter backpack trips with them, perhaps stay longer before our return home.

What can be done about it, the moving on of time, that has made my own hands look old and aged? I must seem ancient to the children I take on nature walks, as old as the tree who's trunk I put my hand on, as I look up and tell its story to them.

I don't feel that much different as I did when I was a kid, when I would take my dog and wander out alone in the fields and foothills near our home. I certainly felt like that same kid today, when I stood admiring the snowflakes falling into the river, the mergansers calling on the lake, the crimson red of the dogwood branches.

I am as uncertain as the mystery of the future as anyone is. I don't trust those who say they have all the answers.

I know this though, I feel spiritually when I walk out there, when I stand at cliff's edge with my dogs in the strong wind from an approaching storm, in the purity of a fresh snowfall, in the silence that is God's language.

If anything will remain when I am gone, I think it will come from the love I have always had for nature and wildness, and the humility and kindness that it evoked in me. Its easy to believe in spirit or soul continuing, when I see the renewal year after year in my walk along the river, beside the path that meanders through the winter woods. That is just the way of things.