Text and photos by Jonathan Shipley
A resolution: be more attentive, deliberate. Experience the moment you’re in rather than dwell on the past or think upon an unknown future. Go for a walk. Pay attention. Even in winter, life abounds.
The marsh is a snowy wasteland. Or is it? Walking, I hear the Canada geese with their rapturous calls on the Yahara. Swans are among them. Some sandhill cranes announce their presence before alighting into the slate gray sky.
Or is it? Box elders, red maples, and hickories are naked of their leaves but they’re very much alive, deepening their roots.
Or is it? Beneath the surface of the pond, turtles and frogs are frozen but far from dead. Come spring, they’ll thaw and return to their crawling and croaking.
And the trails here are a canvas in which I can see life’s tapestry.
There are deer footprints heading over a grassy knoll. Rabbits were on this path before scurrying into the brush. Perhaps an owl, perched ominously in a tree, spooked them. Little mice have darted across the path numerous times, looking for food and bringing it back to their homes for cold months are ahead.
There are footfalls everywhere here at the marsh. I’ve included my own. Here, now, at this moment, a pageant of soft snow and a hearty life.
The moment makes me think of the others who have walked such meadows and boglands, forests and riversides to feel more alive. John Muir comes to mind.
“In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks,” Muir wrote. The famed conservationist, and “the father of America’s national parks,” emigrated from Scotland to Wisconsin.
Born in 1838, young John arrived with his family in the United States in 1849, settling on a farm north of Portage. On the shores of Ennis Lake near Montello, Muir’s parents bought land that they called Fountain Lake Farm. You can still visit it today (though no longer a farm, the place where John Muir discovered America’s beauty remains).
Muir’s father, deeply religious and a hard disciplinarian, had his son working the family farm from dawn to dark. When he could, though, John went into the woods, meadows, and fields, and onto the lake, to indulge in the splendor around him.
He, too, in winter, must have encountered deer tracks and followed them, hoping to find a doe or a pointed buck. Or, perhaps, he saw the prints of a badger and imagined it romping to its den. As snow fell, he undoubtedly followed countless traces of animals, curious as he was about the natural world.
Perhaps Muir walked in this marshland, too. The one that I’m in. He did live in Madison for a time. In 1860 he entered the University of Wisconsin and studied there for three years. On campus, his dormitory was North Hall. He was known to swim in the lakes and gambol most everywhere. “The clearest way into the Universe,” he wrote, “is through a forest wilderness.” He might have seen the universe right here near the Yahara, where I’m standing now, with a clarion of geese singing their songs and the bare tree limbs reaching for the sky.
Here I am, traipsing among the grasses and frozen cattails, thinking about the past and forgetting the resolution I had made for myself already. Experience the moment that you are in rather than dwell on the past or think upon an unknown future. Pay attention.
I look up and see that a crow is eying me suspiciously from an old oak tree. When I stand under it, it takes flight, leaving no footprints in the snow, sharing only this time with me before it is gone.
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