The Halloween Hike
A blood soaked Battlefield transforms me into an unravelling Mummy and an ancient, spooky tree clears the spiderwebs.
~
The past week or so has been chaotic— to say the least. I can’t even remember what I was doing yesterday or the day before or even the last time I took a pause from everything; I had every detail of my day so tightly scheduled, stumbling from one task to the next, saying no a lot and trying to be as present and focused on the task at hand until the alarm on my phone sounded reminding me to go on to the next thing. My days were broken up into three to four hour feeding intervals for a 7 week old squirrel, appointments were scheduled accordingly and I was also pet sitting a pair of dogs, moving my home base from the north side of the river to the south side of the river, co-hosting two separate Halloween events, attending gatherings, helping dear friends de-clutter and working, a little.
It Felt Like A Lot.
I made a point to get outside as much as I could— one of my events was on the water at sunset; and I biked and ran over bridges; one day I even swam for 25 minutes against the current under a bridge! But I didn’t get to bask in the glory of nature. I was only out there for fleetingly brief moments of concentration and I barely left the paved road and emerging concrete jungles of the town of Jupiter. I was full force go-go-go, and today, and as I walked across the blood soaked ground of the historic battlefield, I let it all unwind. It was like a cartoon mummy spinning out of control, the bindings stringing themselves all across the room; or in this case, walking paths and trees.
It was scheduled playtime, but the block of time was dense and it was guaranteed I would get cold, thirsty or hungry long before I had to go feed the dogs. For a little while today, I just followed someone around the park. We tried to get lost, but not too far from the entrance, around and around, over yonder, discovering marked borders of the park, and then our destination appeared. It was a Great Big Grandmother Banyan Tree that looked like it had a hard time in the last hurricane, with a perfect, narrow staircase right up into its massive fork.
Oh, beautiful, ancient tree! She was missing a great amount of her canopy and branches, her bark was cracking and separating from the hard wood center and she had a few opportunistic arboreal plants crowning her interior branches; a nearby (probably) rangpur lime tree offered tart fruit while we let ourselves blend into her branches, plugging into the life-force, charging up, and eventually continuing on. I emerged from the park, this afternoon, feeling cleared and deeply rooted. Like my mother had wiped the inside of my psyche clear of cobwebs with a damp cloth.
Happy Halloween! How do you unwind & reset?