Sauntering

     Thoreau had Walden and I have my woods and my pond too.  I have cleared a path to get to the edge of the pond.  The storms of the past year have taken down many trees and laid them about like piles of twigs.
 At the waters edge there are stumps of small trees where they were all taken down, about a foot and a half above the ground.  This was not the work of an early freak snow, or the strong winds that took the large trees.  The chips on the ground and the pointy tops of the stumps tell the story, and if that isn't enough a walk to the south end of the pond reveals the lodge of the beaver who fell all those trees and took them there to build his home
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Some creature jumps in the water just ahead of me, always just before I can see who it is.  The ice that is covering most of the pond pops and booms as the sun and the changing level of the pond have there affect on it.  The ground around the pond is muddy in the middle of the day but frozen in the mornings and I often cross small feeds into the pond as the water works it's way down from the hills around us.
I have seen ducks and geese, hawks and eagles.  Of course there are also the deer and I am told that there are otters and mink in our little world here, though I never seen them.  I haven't seen the beaver yet either, but I know he is there.

For some, long walks, never retracing steps but ever taking new ones are the only worthy walks.  I think that each moment is new and thus we can never really repeat a step, or take the same walk twice.  I also believe that there are some who don't even have the ability to stand or maybe don't even have two feet to stand upon, who take great voyages, new steps, walks to the holy land of the spirit and mind.  They go where most of us fear to tread and turn back from when faced with some mysterious fork in a road.

I understand Stephen Hawking just turned 70 years old.  He has travelled to places most of us will never dare to go, and all from the chair that anchors his body to the ground.  Some very large distances can be travelled in short walks, and even from not walking at all.

As the cold gets deeper and the ice thicker and snow covers the ground I hope to continue on "a la sainte terre".  All around us is holy land and to tread upon it, reverent and joyful both, is an act of gratitude, or at least it can be, and should be.