Walking on a Cold, Dreary, Rainy Day
Looking for the beauty in everything
In March. In Ontario. Not my favorite month. This year, winter has been very mild, so the melting of it, which is a month early, isn’t as uplifting as it has been in the past. The trails still have ice in some spots where we tamped the snow down with our snowshoes, but usually there is still several inches of snow at this time of year. There would just be a bit of melt at the bottom of the trees, and we’d be tapping and boiling the sap. But we’re not trapping this year. We have a feeling of protection for the trees, we want to give them a break as they didn’t get much water this year. It did snow, but we didn’t have many of the big all day snow storms that I love. The lack of snow isn’t good for the vegetation. I feel a sense of doom drifting around like a dark mist. I shake it off as it snakes up my leg. I’m not allowing it to pull me down, but there it is, in my gut, heavy, mournful.
I am an infinite immortal being of light and I am here in this now, in this changing world. In this life, as in many others in different timelines, I am witnessing this world of pain and sorrow, joy, happiness, lightness of being, heaviness of spirit, many paradoxes amidst deep changes. Political. Environmental. I feel like I’ve lived through this a thousand times. Different scenarios, always with a desire to establish balance and a thriving unity among many, with a sense of joyful creative evolution. But there is a strong energy trying to pull us backward. I am reminded of waves breaking on a shore, the backwards pull and the upwards surge and crash of waves reaching further and further up the beach. There is a tsunami of change coming, that I can feel. And it gives me hope.
As I walk the dogs on the trails, up the ridge into the meadow and then into the forest beyond, I’m looking for a lightness of being inside of me. It is damp, cold, and grey. I see the muted golds and reddish browns of last summer’s goldenrod and milkweed interspersed with the deep greens of spruce and white pine. This isn’t so bad. I am dressed warmly, my hood shelters me from the rain. Breathing in the fresh air, watching the dogs on their sniff trails who don’t seem to care about the rain and the cold, just gathering information through their noses. It’s a good life here.
However, the feeling of doom pulls at me. The world… things going wrong, a feeling of everything falling apart, knowing that life can change in a moment. A re-routing, a blessing in disguise. But why think about a possibility that isn’t happening? Why worry about something that doesn’t exist right now, in this moment?
The earth I walk on here, carved by an ancient glacier, will be here long after I am gone. This gives me an expansive perspective. And watching my dogs, noses to the ground, or stopping suddenly, in stillness, ready to pounce on a hapless vole, they are always in the moment. What sweet, goofy teachers they are.