walking
Walktober (3)
This is an image of the amazing greeting view that met me at the Gate by the Tree of Many Faces. It is still there. It is still beautiful. I checked. The image does not portray the scene. Sometimes images don’t.
Which ones do we edit because they are not enough? Which ones do we edit because there is a shame that a thing will be seen as bad? I believe in a concept of things being bad and not good enough. I believe that the world is becoming a place where everyone is lovely, and that we all have to lie to ourselves to be such. Every effort is enough. Every action gets a reward.
But, does it get the right one? A sense of pleasure and satisfaction with the self, from the self and the spirit? If I judge a passion as a way to judge what is right, what about the person that takes up a hobby that is hard and different, because their joy is simply to try a new thing? I can have shame now at not being enough to notice that what works for me CAN mean that something else is false and wrong, or for taking too long to see another way. I am not at all ready to give up the fact that even the bench warmer gets an award. I wonder if competition and worthiness is not the same as a shame. Yes, Kathy I am pondering the shame post.
I loved the post. I didn’t love that I cried. I loved that I cried. So now, I ponder. I wonder if I am attempting to step back, to detach as some say. I used to have vast difficulties feeling or aiming to feel detached. I would shout, how does detached feel? You want me to be a sociopath? Oh! You want me to disassociate, I’m good at that, however the world says that is bad. So I am going to ponder and attach and detach and reattach someplace else until I am satisfied, and hopefully that won’t mean that I beat the tar out of myself.
I wanted to share all of the wonderful books that I got through Inter-library Loan. I have so many new amazing things to which I wish to attend fully, that I can’t choose. I am also having trouble with focus, fear and worry do that to me. I wonder if it is ok just to admire the heft of each one, the shape, and the feel of the pages. The dent of the text. It is for me.
I walked last night on a manageable loop through a park, around behind the Thomas Taber Museum, onto the Rail Place, through Park Home and back. I think that makes a Tree Place length and there are grasses and many trees and plants, both native and landscaped. It was a nice thing to do after dinner and made it simpler to overcome being stuck and unable to move. I enjoyed it very much, both the freedom from being stuck and the ground so close to home.
PSST! Unsure of how Robin wishes the links to the Walktober Project so,
Walktober (1)
I read Robin’s post entitled Walktober dates on her blog Breezes At Dawn.
I was and am still feeling disturbed and out of sorts emotionally, mentally, and physically from one of the children’s current bouts with mental and neurological differences. I thought and felt angst at missing walks and being able to have calm and peace and to attend to the little things that I love so much. I thought that I can do a Walktober, and then proceeded to make to much to large to handle with present situations. I ripped me to bits about how my walk around the back yard is NOT a walk. YES IT IS!!! #@#*^@$! I decided to take my idea of what is good enough to consider a walk and create what is more real. I made it really simple. If my feet move, it is a walk. If I can only walk 10 feet outside and sit down and notice for as long as I can, it’s a walk. My mind is still shouting, “NO, It is NOT!”
That mind is contributing to my feeling of lack of enjoyment in the life I have been dealt and is creating misery at the loss of the things that I love, rather than allowing my creative enthusiastic parts to do their thing and be really and truly glad for everything that is a ‘can do’.
The snarky part questioned, “Who will want to see images of the same small spot?”
The realistic part answered, “We write this blog only for us and not so many people view it and we don’t so much care, so stop it and just let us have a good time and a wee bit of that ‘challenge’ that Robin tends to do, so that she might smirk at the humor that I might need to do it to get me through a day.”
Dear Robin, I do not really think that you will smirk, though it is very very funny that I wonder if a small and attainable string of goals that are easy to achieve might be helpful! 😛 Love, E.
I went right out intending to do the walk that the snarky bit called a walk, however I had to get equipment for my breathing machine instead. I did have to walk back through the property. It is an old farm property, that now has businesses in all of the buildings. I actually know the family that owned and grew up on the farm. The following images are what I saw. I have also walked around Wegman’s Parking lot (it’s huge) 4 times on two other days, with no pictures taken and I spent an afternoon trekking across a college campus trying to help my other child navigate some snags. I have also noticed myself pacing the house and walking up and down the stairs while I am busy or waiting, or fretting. If my point is activity, then activity is also increased. I am pleased to report that a feeling of restlessness when I have been still is starting to occur. I am also annoyed by it, it’s an ungrounded anxious feeling. I am talking to that ickier feeling and telling it that a walk and then a moment of grounding is nice. Maybe a fix it or not. I shall have to wait and see.
Morning Trip (116)
“Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”
–Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust A History of Walking
Notations from The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham
What I thought, when I’d only reached page four of the text, might leave me for a shitty distasteful feeling that I would wish to scrub from my mind and body as one would a rape–should I continue to read. I took a great amount of time, even in my sleep, considering the context of this book, that had a copy date of 1926. I decided to be amazed to wonder over how the writer thought and how much I will never know if he wrote with the view and influence of humans present in his social grouping at the time. I wonder, even, if he might have been considered a rogue, bluntly writing as he willed his hand to do.
“…They learn little on their wanderings beyond how to cadge, how to steal, how to avoid dogs and the police. They are not pilgrims but outlaws, and many would be highway robbers had they the vitality and the pluck necessary to hold up wayfarers. Most of them are but poor walkers, so that the word tramp is often misapplied to them….”
Later, on page 29, he writes, “…Class is the most disgusting institution of civilization, because it puts barriers between man and man….”
The remaining notes, from my best recollection, are simply things that struck me.
“So when we look on a river we are affected by its hidden relationship to our own life. The river interprets our mood. The road suggests God as a taskmaster who would have us work; the river suggests Him as a poet who would have us live in poetry. The Creator must be a poet–not a General or a Judge or a Master Builder; there is so much of pure poetry in His creation….”
“What is a tramping day if it does not liberate a voice, so that you can sing out your soul to the free sky.”
“The heart can be lifted up by poetry even more than by song. And the inner meaning and the sense of a poem becomes one’s own on the march when it lends it rhythms and verbal emotions to express the hidden yearnings of one’s own being.”
“The life opens us with its very breadth. Is your friend too thin; do not diet him under a white ceiling, but give him air. Air will fill him. It is not the air alone that cures and fills, but what you breathe in with the air. You breathe in the spirit of the open. You breathe in the wideness of the sky; you reach out to the free horizon. It makes a man big, it builds a man within.”
“In the long halt, therefore, one has not stopped living, because one has ceased going onward. You get poised on your center. You feel the origins of joy and pain–deep down at the heart’s core, the place from which something in you is welling up all the while, welling up and overflowing, flowing away in waves and tides, to break on a mystical shore.”
“Self-expression is life. What gives more satisfaction to one’s being than to have expressed oneself.”
“Each day Nature puts her magic mirror in our hands. ‘Oh child, do you see yourself today?'”
Walking and Cleaning House
“When I heard the sounds of soft weeping, I
searched far and beyond for the source of the
sorrowful sound.
Above and below I searched.
Under and around I looked.
I peeked between and through.
Yet never did I find the source…until I
peered within.”
–Mary Summer Rain, Pinecones Autumn Reflections, Volume One of Pinecones and Woodsmoke
Still thinking about Kathy’s Grief post. Made it out for a walk this morning. Yay images! I came home and was pulled to grab the book and opened to the page. 🙂
Cleaning the house for a comfortable place to be.
Faces of the Trees
This is Grum
I know this one's name, but the sounds in it are not sounds I am familiar with making as speech.
This one makes me think of Janus, I did not hear its name, nor did I ask, this trip.
All of today’s Brandon Park images were taken by Elisabeth Connelley, Purple Shoe Photography while playing with a Sigma SD10. Many thanks to the owner of this camera!
Water Wisp Walking–Purple Shoe Photography
Water Wisp Walking--by Elisabeth Connelley
Images are the property of Elisabeth Connelley and Purple Shoe Photography. They are offered in limited numbered prints.
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Elisa's Spot 