I’m back in the North Woods. I look out the window above this desk made of three pine boards and see a forest of long-needle white pines, short-needle firs, brawny red pines and a few scraggly maples street fighting their way up.
Looking south, I find the sun rising over an azure lake brushed with white mist. Near shore, a feeding largemouth bass sends out a ring of wavelets. I hear overhead the high-pitched squeak of an immature eagle.
Yesterday, I took a short walk. Short because less than a quarter-mile away, down a grassy path, a momma black bear and her cub visited the trout pond where I often fly fish.
On my walk, I discovered what passed for splendor:
• A grouping of what looked like a triad of blueberries.
• A gray leaf pockmarked with droplets from morning rain.
• A bell-shaped blossom neither blue nor purple but could have been either.
• A monarch butterfly flitting from leaf to leaf as if each were hot to the touch.
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• A small creek whose sandy bottom glowed in the dappled afternoon sun like golden granules.
• A grove of quaking aspen, their tea-green leaves fluttering like wispy butterfly wings.
I am moved by what to my younger self would have been taken for granted – or ignored. I am older now.
Older than days filled with dart gun fights, water balloon battles, cannonball contests, fishing ventures, numerous walks in and out of the woods (some call it golf).
Older than when emotions boomeranged between ecstasy and distress depending on the look a girl gave me when asked if she wanted to crew for me in a sailboat race.
On whether I landed the northern pike stuck in a weed bed 10 feet deep.
On being tagged and jailed or winning the game by kicking the can.
On having two dimes to buy the latest Superman and Beetle Bailey comic books.
On making it back to the cabin after a walk around the lake with or without ticks, bulbous with blood, burrowed into my skin.
On hearing my father tell my brothers and me we were going logging to chop down dead trees, cut them up with a two-man saw into 4-foot lengths and then quarter them with sledge and wedges into fireplace logs – or be asked by friends to serve as a fourth for tennis.
Youth favors action. A septuagenarian, I’ve left action – except for physical therapy exercises, occasional trips to the gym and half-hour walks along public wooded trails.
Instead, I’m drawn to nature.
In 1856, on a cold night in Dixon, Illinois, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a lecture defining “beauty” as “the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms.” In a word, flux.
“The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of every thing into every other thing. … My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors and constellations.”
When I look at a sunflower eyeing its namesake or I stumble across a newborn fawn lying curled asleep, I am moved beyond the artless notion of identifying the physical forms of a flower and deer.
On her June 23 podcast “The Happiness Lab,” Dr. Laurie Santos recommends we become more attuned to moments in life that deliver a sense of wonder, awe. Some find revelation in religious devotion. Others, like me, find, as did the romantic poet William Blake “… a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.”
• Rick Holinger has taught English and creative writing on the college and secondary school levels. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his writing appears in Chicago Quarterly Review, Chautauqua, Boulevard, Witness and elsewhere. His book of poetry, “North of Crivitz,” and collection of essays, “Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences,” are available at local bookstores, Amazon or richardholinger.net. Contact him at editorial@kcchronicle.com.