power outage

I was working away this evening & planning to keep going late into the night when the power went out. After momentary irritation, I felt a huge relief. It was the perfect moment to go for a sunset hike.

Something in me has been resisting moving my body. It’s been harder to start walks, hikes, adventures even though I crave them & know how enlivening & restorative they are for me.

My feet found the trail up the hill behind my house. I always say, “It kicks your ass right away.” And it always does. I get out of breath & my heart pounds. I break through the barrier of it being too hard right away & keep going. It’s always like that.

Then there’s the water & sky merging. The tide is in tonight & the Bay is as full as I’ve ever seen. The tides baffle me again—how they keep a rhythm, steady and mysterious. I try to understand the patterns & predict them, but I’m too mesmerized by the beauty & seeming magic to track it all effectively.

I find it romantic, the motion, sounds & relentlessness of the waves that keep coming whether they are coming in or going out. It all turns me on. I’m attracted to this land & the nature I live among. An unending blessing.

I need contact with the shoreline & the tides. It helps me make sense of things that make no sense. It helps me be in the unknown without the addiction to confusion or disappearing myself. It’s effortlessly helpful to my spirit & my sense of knowing I belong. It’s always right-time, right-place medicine.

The soft, richness of the water tonight was everything. It’s a reminder of what really matters & that I can (and need to) take the time to nourish myself in this way. The trails, trees, shore, and water, they are the fabric of my life that I am woven into.

I can’t overstate how much it means to me. And somehow days can go by where I stay at my desk & force myself to be productive & perform.

As I came back down the hill from my hike, I saw the power was back on. My internal nature-fueled power was also back on line.

In the last 10 minutes of today, I think about watching my cats chasing grasshoppers in the grass. Their ridiculous cuteness makes me so happy. Goodnight. Grateful for the reset, the hike, and the grasshoppers.