We have made a trail, a hiking path from one end of our property to the other. An out-and-back trip takes eight minutes. Because the terrain is fairly hilly, a walk of, say 45 minutes, feels like pretty good exercise.
Much of the ground where we live is wild and untamed, so a walk on our trail is as much about seeing wild ducks or hearing distant coyotes as it is about physical fitness achieved via an elevated heart rate.
I hiked the trail yesterday. Seeing a large, dead tree, I remembered back to a day several years ago when I instigated what turned out to be a tree cutting fiasco. The dead tree overhangs the fence that surrounds our sheep pasture, and my worry at the time was that the tree might blow over in a storm and flatten the fence, maybe even one of the sheep. My shortsighted solution was to cut the tree down. As I fired-up a chain saw and cut the first limb from the tree, about eight or ten flying squirrels (who I didn’t know lived in the tree) took to the air, fleeing the attack of the stupid human with the killer saw. That was the end of the tree-cutting project, and a lesson learned that, around here (and probably where you live too) everything is habitat.
We’ve hung Tibetan prayer flags over one end of the trail. My walk takes me under the flags, then to a pile of small stones that I use to keep track of my “laps.” Once I’ve moved six (or sometimes eight) stones from yesterday’s pile to today’s, I feel like my hike is done.
A simple thing, that walk, but I guess for me it’s the simple things that matter most.
