To find new things, take the path you took yesterday.
– John Burroughs
The winding path approaches the secluded and peaceful place.
– Huang Binhong
What a relaxed life is that which flees the worldly clamor, and follows the hidden path…
– Fray Luis De Leon
I combed through a dozen or so photo albums from road trips I’ve taken over the past 45 years, looking for familiar scenes I return to over and over again, either in person, or by remembering through so many photos that each bring me back to very specific places that sustain me and bring peace..
These may be a picture of the path ahead of me along a stream or creek as I am walking downstream. It might be a dirt road I have been traversing in a national forest, a desert out West, or a well known road in the ACE Basin near Charleston. In every instance, these roads and paths in places like Magnolia Gardens and Charles Towne Landing state Historical Park, have allowed me over the years to take comforting and quiet walks, or trips in my car, windows down and wind coming in gently, in search of something I am never able to define or describe as I wish I could. Yet I know I must keep seeking. Now sadly, I’m a homebody and do much less outdoors than I used to.
I often take photos of a path or road I am walking or traveling along because I want to both remember more clearly where I have been, looking back years later, but also to be able to look at that path and think about the setting, the landscape, the scenery, and the mental and spiritual state of mind I was in during those brief encounters that over decades taken on sacred qualities because they nourish the soul.
With only a few exceptions, I have traveled or walked these paths and trails alone, free of human distraction, but also with a heart weary at times from over-acquaintance with solitude.
The prospect of being alone on long road trips across the country has never impeded my quests over the years. But now I would think twice because these days I travel hardly at all and only for short distances. I have fewer destinations I feel almost compelled to seek out, as when I was younger, and the ones which I now seek out, I return to over and over again, such as Hampton Park, right in the city and the county park and Nature sanctuary 15 miles from where I live, and light years from the noise and stress of the city.
In those most familiar and comforting sanctuaries, I am content to walk the same paths and trails whenever I go there, over and over again, knowing, as Burroughs observed, that I will discover new things each time. That learning, those experiences of Nature, and that search for answers in quiet contemplation as I sit on a bench beneath an old oak tree, have unfolded over a lifetime, and collectively exert as powerful a pull on me as ever, as I am discovering anew each day when I go out into the outdoors.
The full album:
https://www.flickr.com/gp/camas/L41eG9A6i9
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