A Hill Walking Poem Part One: In Nature Poem by Daniel Brick

In simple earnest, I never found myself alone
within the embracement of rocks and hills, a
traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit
courses, drives, and eddies like a leaf in
Autumn. A wild activity, of thoughts, imagina-
tions, feelings, and impulse of motion rises up
from within me.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The journey I am taking today is not
a journey planned by unsleeping Fate.
My adventure begins in the fluctuating space
of Romance, and continues in the time frame
of Chance. I must keep wandering,
like the opening allegro of a symphony,
across widening circles that briefly
enclose me before nudgiong me elsewhere.
Even if I remember a place from a past trek,
it is still an elsewhere in this moment.
This was once a mystery, but no more. I embrace
paradox... I pass neither exits nor entrances:
it is just a long road which bends back on itself
through fields of bright greeen foliage
of summer's steady growth. In the distance
I see farmers tending their crops,
coaxing growth out of rich soil, the land's bounty
given with prodigal abandon by the Earth Spirit.
A haze separates me from that work and service.
I trudge outward, reaching a place of hills
rolling across grasslands. I climb and descend
three of them, with the tallest, the second,
giving me a vista of pathless fields which
farmers manuever with ease. But my mission
is elsewhere, always elsewhere, away from
settled homes and settled lives.

I enter a zone of more spacious grasslands
with groves of trees rising above them, as if
they were islands in a green sea. I pause.
Keeping very still, I watch deer grazing
at the edge of a woods, birds landing, pecking
at the ground, then launching into flight,
squirrels and rabbits making their sudden
entrances and exits, a lone fox lying
in a pool of sunlight. I slowly let myself
slip to the ground, and sit with my back
against a dead tree. I doze, at first fitfully,
my sleep interrupted by a faint inner summons
to hike while the day is young, but to no avail:
I simply sink into a deeper sleep, and imagine
I am dreaming, or dream I am imagining. Either way
it is a poem taking form, discovering itself
in the stillness within and without.

When I awake I rejoice in the open air,
swirling around me in gentle waves.
Oh, blessed open air! And the stillness
without envelops me. I build a small fire,
and prepare a cup of black tea Marsha pounded
into a powder for my trip. The taste of the tea
is complex: it reminds me of people indoors, groups
of peole in conversation, friends and strangers
talking, laughing. behaving as one - all alike.
But I embrace this solitude and desire
only to lengthen it, stretch myself within it.
I let my soul emerge from its body cell
into the open air where it blends with Nature:
the sounds of rushing water and the wind rushing
over the grasses, the touch of breezes like a caress
or winds like a slap, the smell of growth and decay
which is one smell when I trust my senses, the sights
that turn my eyes into beacons that illuminate
this beauty, my eyes looking without and within
and seeing, truly seeing, they are the same reality.
Is it for this awareness I am alive? Is this
the elsewhere I seek, my mission's goal?