“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”—Henry David Thoreau

 

“Clearly, Thoreau was not working under a deadline.”–Brad Dye

 

I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods of late.  Such is the way of things for the obsessed turkey hunter in the months of March and April — and May if you’re lucky enough to have a few more out of state hunting trips planned.

 

Having been at it a month now, I know from years of experience that several things happen and don’t happen during this hectic time each year.  Under the “happen” category, work inevitably gets busier and deadlines seem to come around more frequently than normal.

 

Typically, this happens just about the time that the turkeys start gobbling good.  Inevitably, you’re in a meeting, stuck at your desk working on reports, or on a critical sales call when the texts from friends start rolling in with grip and grin photos of said friends with giant multi-bearded gobblers.

T.S. Eliot was correct in his assessment in “The Waste Land” that “April is the cruelest month.”

 

By the end of March, you’re dead tired, the yard needs mowing and the patio furniture, once a beautiful shade of periwinkle blue, has now turned a dull yellow from a thick coating of pine pollen.  Such is the life of a turkey hunter.

 

While trying to avoid the task of completing several training modules for work one night earlier this week, I found myself scrolling through recent photos I had taken while turkey hunting.

 

Fortunately, my amateur photography and my thoughts while on multiple turkey hunting walkabouts did provide me with an idea for this week’s column, which I was also avoiding sitting down to write, perusing my pictures instead.

 

I was joking about the “Walden” writer not being encumbered by a deadline.  In fact, this article proves Thoreau’s point from the earlier quote that I referenced.

 

Here’s the quote in its entirety: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!  Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”

 

Like Thoreau, my creative thoughts really do begin to flow when I’m in the outdoors and, of late, it seems that I am most enamored with sunrises.  Actually, that’s not true, I’ve always been enamored with them.  In fact, a search of my photo library yields 240 pics of sunrises and sunsets, six in the last few days alone.

 

I love watching the woods come alive at first light and have always been amazed by the abundant life that exists in the small area that surrounds me, no matter if that area be the swamps of South Florida, the mesquite flats of Texas, or some corner of the farm in Winston County.

 

Thoreau also aptly captures this feeling when he writes that “you only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the wood that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.”

 

I’m forever amazed how the power of stillness can transform the alien into the accepted.  Within moments of sitting still and quiet in the forest, I mesh with the backdrop and the birds (at least the songbirds) lose all fear. There truly is magic in stillness, powerful, restorative, healing magic.

 

Two other photographs from my recent visual journal recalled the writings of another Transcendentalist.  The first picture is of the waters of a natural spring.  I have always been infatuated with the spring that bubbles to life in one of the hollows here at the farm.

 

I think that perhaps its crystal-clear waters remind me of my walks as a boy in the creeks near my childhood home.  The man becomes the boy once more or, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “in the woods, too, a man casts off years as the snake his slough and at what period so ever of life is always a child.”

 

Another photo, that of an aged log, almost petrified in appearance, that lies half submerged in earth and leaves along a well-worn game trail, brought to mind listening to stories at the knees of my grandmother.

 

What tales must this matriarch of the woods have inside her.  How I long to sit beside her weathered rings and understand, if only briefly, what this place once was, what it felt like to burst forth from the understory, to tower above it, to be then sawed and felled, and now, to slowly rejoin the earth and begin anew.

 

There are times when I think I would have made a good Transcendentalist, perhaps a less intellectual Emerson or, maybe, a less insightful Thoreau.  I’m certain that what I lack in wisdom I could make up for with an abiding love and enthusiasm for nature itself and for being a part of it.

 

Until next time, here’s to the sunrises and natural spaces that inspire us all, and here’s to seeing you out there in our great outdoors.