FIELD NOTES: When you feel like walking away from everything...

...first, you buy good boots...

...and it doesn't hurt to buy matching shades to walk into the sunset...

FIELD NOTES: These boots are made for walkin'?

...I figured I could take a couple of loops around Harrybrooke after tutoring today without having to stop home to change…I have “Saturday-wear” on …skinny jeans, cotton sweater, down vest, ponytail…I even have sunglasses and my Klean Kanteen of water…however,I forgot to throw my walking shoes into the car…but my gray suede boots are flat…they should be okay… we have been experiencing a Seattle-ish winter so I have a good amount of company in the park…quiet company, contented company, nature’s company…I start at the Sri Chinmoy sign as usual and breathe in the softened Februrary air…as incorrect as butter left out on the counter too long, yet somehow delicious …two-thirds in, I notice my thin dress socks are sliding around a bit in my boots…uh-oh…friction is not good on the sole…perhaps I should only do one mile today…but it’s like flossing my teeth…I won’t feel right if I don’t complete the routine, so I go again…at the point of no return, the bottoms of my feet are burning…as a proud walker, I am taken by surprise as I gain new appreciation for athletic socks and shoes…in hoping to avoid blisters, I think to walk off-road, as the words of Nancy Sinatra follow me from a long-ago 45 on my little record-player…”These boots are made for walkin’, and that’s just what they’ll do, and one of these days these boots are gonna’ walk all over you”…dum-dum-dum….back then, I had no relationship to that song other than payback for one of my three older brothers or the pre-teen pecking order of fifth grade girls…I give up trying to keep my standard pace of a fourteen minute mile and just try to tip-toe my way to the car, thinking about aloe…these boots aren’t made for walkin’...but they did make me think…

FIELD NOTES: when the enormity of nature...

...requires the acuity of haiku.

Sunday Afternoon at Harrybrooke

Geese swim where lawn grew.

Walk? Melting flood, but......Japan!

My troubles: puddle.


Unbelievable footage of Japanese tsunami 03/11/11

FIELD NOTES: To be of few words...

Harrybrooke Haiku

...is sometimes to be wished for…

October Walking

Leaves tattle: "Feet! Feet!"
Soft brown needle shower, I
seal lips, hold breath…fall…

FIELD NOTES: Freedom came not from learning to ride my bike, but from leaving...

August afternoon

...my yard and driving on the mother-forbidden street! At Harrybrooke today there are lucky children, lucky because they have parents who brought them here. A toddler boy jogs alongside his stroller. The preschool teacher in me smiles when I hear the dad ask his boy to count the Canada geese. Although liberated from his stroller, he was not liberated from his parents’ fears: “Don’t go so fast, that’s how you fell last time. Slow down, slow down! That’s how you fell! Don’t go near the geese. Geese are very, very mean. They will bite you!” A helmeted elementary-aged boy learning to ride a two-wheeler is cheered on by his parents until he tumbles in the pathway. As I approach from behind in my power walk, I prepare to root for the boy myself and tell him to keep it up, but Dad is sputtering next to Mom: “Don’t stop pedaling! Come on, pedal, pedal…aw, not again! Don’t stop pedaling! (sigh) He KNOWS how to do it!” I close my mouth not wanting to go into the fray of family frustration. Instead, I notice how the cattails have evolved into their coveted state, brown and velvety and oblong, the frankfurters-on-a-stick of nature and how the voice of Harrybrooke has deepened from the soprano of spring peepers to the bass of bullfrogs. So will the voices of the young boys I notice today. It’s true that geese can bite and boys often don’t learn their lessons as fast as we’d like, but the streets of nature have often taught me to stand back and watch with my hands behind my back. Some things...water, wind, storms, weeds...will take their own courses anyway. And it is I that needs to find freedom in this loss of control. (Sigh)