Christmas 2014

View from my Window Early on Christmas Morning 

I always rise early on Christmas. It used to be for the kids, but they’re gone now. Then it was for the sheep as Christmas coincided with lambing time, but they’re gone too. And ten years ago it was to prepare the house for friends and family, but the Ashland house has been sold and Jim and I are divorced. Change, they say, is the only constant in our lives, and this year I am aware of how Christmas changes just like everything else. Special traditions like Christmas can be tricky, so I had created a plan weeks ago: I would celebrate it in my cathedral of trees and water: Silver Falls State Park. I've always felt a sense of renewal, creativity, and inspiration in the woods, and Silver Falls has deep wilderness areas, a seven mile trail that passes by seven waterfalls, and it is the most peaceful place I know of.  It has been raining for weeks. The ground is super saturated. The waterfalls would be at their best! Plus I love to sing around waterfalls because they drown me out. Today I felt like walking and singing and planning for  2015, so off I headed.

I drove past our farm on Valley View Road. It was lit up
and there was a big plastic snowman in the front yard,
so I know there's a good family feeling inside.

I drove past unharvested trees on Christmas tree farms.

And then began the seven mile hike.

Moss Loves this Park!

Unofficial falls were everywhere!

For most of the way the path was soft and muddy ,
but paths do get hard and steep sometimes.
This one did at several junctures that took me up and
down the canyon walls. 

These words by David Whyte from his "Winter Harvest" essay ring true for me today:

"It takes patience, time and attention and perhaps a proper friendship with silence to understand the gifts of winter that make themselves known only to begin with, far inside us, or to properly harvest a metaphorical inner darkness that might be experienced, even at the height of an outside summer. In winter, the outer world may seem to have come to a halt, but inside there is a beautiful hidden intelligence, which left to itself creates its own new birth and arrival, even in the most difficult times. This winter harvest depends on stillness, a learned patience, a radical letting alone of the self, a radical simplification of that self, a giving up of the old light filled certainties and a willingness in the midst of it all, to start again, even when we do not know exactly where to place our feet in the faint light."

  Silver Falls Park. Christmas 2014. A good place to walk in today's faint light.