A spider bundle

I've gone back to doing 1.5 hours of walking per day. What this means is that I am still walking but I'm not utterly exhausted as I was with the 3 hour daily marathon. I get a chance to meditate during the walk, to enjoy the birds, to savor the gorgeous sunny day. I sat simmering in the sunshine. I yakked with a fellow walker about Ukrainian traditional folklore - an area where his wife is an expert. It was a great chat. I learned a bit about Ukrainian culture and I visited the website at the University of Alberta (www.arts.ualberta.ca/uvp/).

I came home and made another cup of the delish Darjeeling tea my brother sent me from the Thunderbolt tea company in Darjeeling, India. Yum. I'm just waiting now for my sons to get home from school and to pick them up. I've learned to just sip tea, wait and grow. It is a very laid back way to exist. I don't understand why people have such difficulty with retirement and such pain over not working. The real pain is working. I think once you learn that work is just a way to kill brain cells, you prefer not to work. Of course, if you work is something that keeps you happy then you're really not working - you are doing what you love which is what I do when I walk and when I write and when I love hubby and the boys. Work that you love isn't work it is joy and life affirming labor. Work that you hate that kills the spirit and makes you watch the clock is soul destructive and punitive to the heart. Most work is unfortunately of the latter kind.

But right now, I'm savoring the joy work. The walk that is done but not destroyed me. The small puttering at the working space while I wait for the chicken to bake. The salad I'll put together. The small meal. Then bringing my boys home. The sun is lighting up the cigarette trees and making them flame. I wish I could be back in the forest right now. The squirrels have their question mark tails up against their fat behinds. There are wishes in the air. A noisy raven caws away at the logs like a saw. I found two small black woodpeckers about the size of my nine year old son's fist. They didn't have the red markings. I found a few chickadees calling their usual dee-dee-dee to me and asking for handouts but I wasn't able to oblige. I had my two oranges and I ate them. They were sweet and juicy and fragrant and clean. I wish I could be a bit of funnel cloud in the inverted blue bowl of sky and have my spoon trees stirring me all day long. The blueness of the sky envelopes me when I go out and I'm posted to another world where the trees call out to me and they snake their roots all over the pine coned floor. There are branches like pointer sticks everywhere and a dream comes to me of the children that lie in the forest like eggs waiting to hatch. I wish I knew that the river unfreezing comes to the hatching of these children and melts away into water. I saw a log flat on a ice block like a chopped head A gush of water under the bridge spurted merrily like the cut veins of a child. I washed my mind clean of the debris of my worries and scrubbed the screen white. I wish I could run through the forest instead of limp along. I wish I could dimple in the sun and dry into a plum. I wish somehow I could just be and not think of the thoughts that crowd themselves like cans on a shelf waiting for hands to reach out and buy them. I want to be empty.

The walk does do what it is supposed to do which is remind me where I am in the ordinary scheme of the universe- in the right place for me - tight in the web of home - a spider bundle. I'm sure there are other spaces I could occupy but none as closed and tight and swaddled as this one. I am happy here -no matter the restrictions. And in any case, the restrictions are all in my mind. In reality, I am free as those birds, those squirrels. The tress intersect their branches and weave a fabric more dense than the dendritic connections in any human mind and once I enter their cloth, I'm free of the chores of the day, I'm emptied of requirements and in my small spider web, in the corner of Samesville, I am here, snug, warm and happy. In my own way.