We are officially in Phase 2 of reopening here in southeastern Washington, and while I am looking forward to doing some things we haven't done for a long time, just getting out into the wild is a sublime thing.
The evening we went to the river in these pictures, I put on my rubber boots and straw hat, took my camera, and wandered through an undiscovered wood. I foraged, sniffed, gazed, and touched. I took in textures and colors, shadows and sparkles. Perhaps most importantly, I listened.
I've been doing a deep dive back through years of posts here and seeing how my relationship with nature and the elements has given me so much. I hope I have been a good to the land and that I have given back as much as I have been given. Listening, which for me is also feeling, has been a constant theme.
I've been thinking a lot about the essay by Jay Griffiths I posted about last November, but also about acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton's Sanctuaries of Silence, which I first heard on the Emergence Magazine podcast and then later watched the film. Gordon Hempton defines silence not as the absence of sound but the absence of noise from modern life. I feel this deeply when I'm out in the wild and it's one of the reasons I love it so much. For me this is true sound - sound free of human static. Hempton's work and projects are so wonderful. The last link below is excellent and talks about several of them, if you are interested.
Watch/Read/Listen:
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
We Need an NRA for Nature.
What Hangs On Trees.
Timelines.
Silence and the Presence of Everything.
Until next time ~