Seeing, feeling. Looking.

When you walk outside, what do you see? Even just for a quick breath, even just to walk your dog or for the split second that you’re in open air before getting in your car and driving to work. What do you see? What do you hear?

Sidewalk, perhaps, weeds growing through the cracks. Bricks stacked perilously in a wall or a firepit, moss growing on the corners. Trash bins lying empty on the road or near full, depending on the day of the week. Trees, low shrubs, manicured bushes, dead grass. Birds on roof-peaks.

Truth is, I don’t know where you are or what you see–I don’t even know if you look. Sometimes I don’t look. We should look. The world’s spent long enough waiting for us to look.

Look at the sunlight slanting through the trees. Look at the long grass swaying, the squirrels rustling through the leaf litter. Look.

Look at the green-greens of the tree’s leaves. Look at the way in which the grass bends to the will of the wind. Look at how the brown of the squirrel is indistinguishable from the color of the forest floor until–there. Right there. There it is.

My backyard as a kid overlooked this dense forest littered with four-wheeler trails that filled with rain and formed sweet little marshes for tadpoles. Great big berry bushes, thickets of thorns, deer paths in the mud. Acres and acres of land untamed–to a kid, at least. The quad trails said otherwise. Either way, that forest is now exclusive to patio homes.

Let me tell you what I see.

I see small birds taking flight from treetops; not finches or sparrows or any other type I’d be able to recognize with a glance. Perhaps a mourning dove, if I had to guess from the tail. I’ll have to look it up later.

Crows fly in from my right, calling good afternoon in their journey to the canyon beyond the border of the fence. I feel the soft touch of the cold air brush my fingers. The winds rustle through the trees, shaking the leaves to the ground. We’ve had strong winds these last few days, bringing forward the cold air from a different place and marking the end of the false-winter. At the time I’m transferring this to here (I handwrite these ahead of time), it’s again another warm weather stretch in January. Weather is frightening.

The leaves flutter to the ground all around me–in these moments, I feel truly special. Almost as if the trees themselves are greeting me with a love they’ve given to none other. The sight of them awakes a sense of spirituality I’ve never had for anything but them.

Wildlife at this time is hard to come by, but it gets easier when you’re actually paying attention. Wake early enough and it’s almost a different world; brown squirrels coming down from their perches to feast and groundhogs bumbling their rumps across your yard. Deer are at the same time less often than you’d think and more often than you’d guess, rarely seen anywhere but on the precarious sides of roads.

What was the point of all of this? I’ve forgotten. I got lost along the way, just curiously observing what’s around me. Engaging my “inner child”, as the psychologists say–I try to refrain from giving everything a label. Just let it be.

I suppose that’s all it was about anyway, getting lost in my own thoughts. Letting the whimsy take over, and hopefully encouraging you to do the same. Everything was wild, once, even thoughts.

Some part of me is unsatisfyingly curious about things. I like to think it makes my life a little more exciting (although I have been called mysterious before. I take it as a compliment.) The point of this journal (blog, article, place-where-a-random-person’s-thought-gets-thrown-onto-page) is, as I’m starting to gather, to let myself wonder. To give my thoughts meaning and follow them where they lead instead of just going “I wonder why that is.”

My wondering feels at a natural end. Thank you for reading this, though I doubt anyone more than my Mom (or Husband) has gotten this far. I’d add pictures, but I don’t know how.