Mary Oliver – Upstream (2016)

To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday. Look more closely. What was overlooked before will reveal itself: the glint of a beetle’s wing, the curve of a tendril, the tiny tracks of a field mouse on the morning frost.

John Burroughs – Wake-Robin (1871)

I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed. I walk out; I see this or that tree, and all at once, a shift in light, a movement of shadow, and it becomes something new. The world is always changing in small and sudden ways. The act of looking is itself an act of discovery.

Annie Dillard – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

The other day, I returned home after an idyllic walk at the park photographing many resplendently beautiful japonica camellias, drifting in an among huge live oaks and towering shrubs full of red, pink and white camellia blooms, lost in a world of endless beauty and the reverie of tranquility.

This park is set in the middle of the city, but is like a fortress, temporarily shielding me from the noise and traffic just outside the gates. It’s a world apart, like stepping through a portal into a parallel universe.

As I parked the car after arriving home, I didn’t want the feeling I experienced at the park to end, so I decided to stroll along the edge of the marsh and tidal creek outside my apartment.

The temperature was a perfectly cool and invigorating 58 degrees. The low angle of the setting sun was perfect for taking photographs, and the restlessness, traffic and commotion of the outside word were gone from sight and hearing, just an eighth of a mile from one of the busiest thoroughfares in Charleston.

I felt myself so attuned to my surroundings, so grateful for this little Eden in the midst of the city, that as I walked on a layer of leaves and pine straw, I suddenly saw photographs of small details in Nature everywhere I looked. I walked slowly and deliberately, my eyes taking in everything, the familiar and the unexpected.

As many times as I’ve walked along the creek at every stage of the tide, that day felt different. The bad news and the negative thoughts about the state of this country and world that earlier had dominated my fretful consciousness at that time, now were totally gone. I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular. I was simply immersed in the Eternal Now, the moment at hand, and nothing else. That is how the tiniest details of my surroundings popped into my field of vision and my awareness again and again. The larger marsh landscape glowed in the fading sunlight. Hawks soared overhead.

It was utterly and pleasantly cool, and feeling slightly cooler as the sun set. I didn’t want the experience to end, this seemingly commonplace activity transformed into flowing moments of time, until time had no meaning.

In a sense, I was experiencing a loss of self-consciousness. I became so absorbed in the present moment that self-doubt and distractions faded away.

Every movement I made as I very slowly walked along felt natural and fluid, as if it was happening automatically, unconsciously.

What I was experiencing in those golden moments that couldn’t last was a glimpse into the infinite consciousness from which I first emerged into life.

In short, there was no beginning or end to what I was experiencing. It was not induced by some psychedelic substance, or enhanced by any kind of r relational drug or intoxicant. It was purely natural, but also purely transcendent and otherworldly.

The feeling of of perfect well being and peace linger still from that afternoon walk as I try to write about it now. Words, as usual, only incompletely an inadequately convey the unsought insights and interior revelations that I experienced then, and which linger now and will always be with me.

Some of the photographs from the walk:

https://www.flickr.com/gp/camas/1799n0S8j8