Posts Tagged ‘Forest Bathing’
Couldn’t Fly
We drove home. The weather didn’t clear up enough in the Cities for us to fly Mike’s plane back. Not for lack of us trying to will the clouds to lift. We checked for promising progress frequently throughout the day, but that didn’t seem to help. A watched weather report doesn’t necessarily clear.
The focus of our dual-purpose trip shifted more toward the speedboat motor getting serviced and the boat being brought back to the storage building on their secondary property.
That gave us time to kill, which we used for another walk through their woods.
There was a fair amount of bright fall colors in the leaves near the ground.
However, there were very few leaves of any hue left in the branches overhead.
The boat dealer told Mike they could have his motor service completed by 3:00. If flying weather was going to improve enough, Mike suspected it wouldn’t happen until around 4:00. The potential was there for us to accomplish both his main goals, even though Mike was more than willing to take care of just one and call the trip a success.
If a window of good flying weather conditions opened up, we would take it immediately and leave the boat to be picked up on a future trip to their cabin. We plotted a course of action for the day, packed up our gear, and left the cabin to walk more trails on their property.
After that, we headed to town for a late lunch and then drove to the boat dealer to wait for the service work to be completed, watching flying conditions on an app all the while.
It wasn’t improving at all.
The call to report the boat was ready came at about 2:58. We hooked it up and drove back to their property to park the boat and trailer in their storage building. Then we drove back into Grand Rapids and stopped for one last check at around 4:00.
It was obvious, which made it an easy call, despite how badly we both wanted to fly. We were driving home, and into the dark of night. The flight would have taken around an hour and twenty minutes. The drive was over three and a half hours.
However, fear not! We had each other and my digital music library for entertainment. The time passed easily, especially with Mike doing the driving. It’s a route he has traveled for 40 years, making him an excellent tour guide for points of interest along the way.
I was only away from home for 35 hours, but Asher gave me a greeting when I walked in the door like it had been a LOT longer. I suppose he was measuring my absence in dog-years.
.
.
Clearing Trails
The list of tasks related to fighting back the natural growth constantly threatening to overgrow our property is getting shorter and shorter. On Sunday morning, I took the chainsaw into the woods to cut up the trees and limbs that had fallen across several of our trails. Yesterday, the tool of choice was the STIHL string trimmer to clean up the paths, some of which we haven’t been walking since they’d gotten too overgrown.
Soon after I’d made it a little way down one of those pathways we hadn’t been on, I discovered another downed tree we hadn’t noticed that would require the chainsaw.
Before
After
The two plants most often cluttering the pathways are Virginia Creeper vines and wild raspberry shoots. Less often, there will be clumps of whispy grasses that tend to resist the spinning trimmer line. Shredding the growth at ground level in the woods with the string trimmer tends to kick up a lot of moist dirt that sticks all over me.
It became a toss-up between the splattering dirt or the mosquitoes as to which was most irritating.
There are two versions of trails through our woods. One is wide enough to accommodate an ATV, which is a valuable thing to be able to do sometimes. The majority of the wide trails were already in existence when we bought the property.
The rest of the trails have intentionally been left narrow to limit them to foot traffic. We have created almost all of these pathways.
This was only the second time this growing season that I have used the trimmer to mow down the trails through the woods. I’m hoping it won’t need to happen again, as growth should begin to slow soon now that we are in the dog days of summer.
There remains some branch pruning to be done to reach my ideal of perfectly well-tended trails, but we are darn close to completing the maintenance of our walkways in the woods.
Forest bathing can soon commence without obstructions.
I suspect I don’t reap the same rewards of walking through the woods when I am wielding a loud and smelly small gas engine and wreaking havoc on a wide variety of growing plant life.
I’ll just have to take follow-up walks on all the trails after I am done, which is easy to make time for since they become somewhat irresistible when they are so thoroughly groomed.
.
.
Photo Moments
Another fine day in the woods of northern Minnesota. Strong winds, warm temperatures, smoky haze-filled sky, swimming, eating like royalty, and ending the day with the spectacle of the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris.
.
.
Diet Transition
Imagine if people had to be as careful about changing their regular diet as the animals in our care. Full disclosure: this line of thought is coming from someone who doesn’t have any food allergies.
For two completely different reasons, we are currently in the process of changing the foods of both our dog and the horses. It is a long period of gradual transition from the old food to the new, serving a portion of each at a sliding percentage.
The horses don’t appear to care much about the introduction of something different thus far. I haven’t seen any indication of change in preference for the mixture we’ve been serving them.
Asher may be happy with his changing mixture because it was starting to look like he didn’t care for the food he’s been served since we adopted him. He’s shown no hesitation with the new brand.
I feel very lucky that the food I can choose to eat isn’t dictated by someone else. Unfortunately, that leaves it up to me to make smart choices. I was thinking the other day that it takes constant mental energy for me to avoid succumbing to my cravings for carbs or sugar foods.
It’s always great when you are granted a free pass to have as much as you want of a healthy food. Why doesn’t spinach taste more like chocolate? I love the feeling when I am thirsty and my body seems like it can’t get enough of a tall glass of ice water. Guilt-free reward.
Oxygen is something else I can consume as much as I want with no limitation. When my mind yearns for something my body doesn’t need, I can think about the total free pass I have to inhale as many huge breaths of air as possible.
Yeah, I’m weird like that.
This time of year there is a lot of tractor time when thoughts can meander. Yesterday afternoon, I was finally able to drive on and mow some of the areas that were saturated two days ago.
It amazes me how fast conditions change. The high ground around here is getting bone-dry. After I finished mowing the backyard, spotty thundering rain clouds rolled past. I put away the tractor and prepared for a downpour.
All we got was a spattering of drops.
I’m guessing all that ground moisture is getting sucked up by plants and trees making leaves. There is now a fresh new batch of phytoncides to absorb while bathing in the atmosphere of our glorious forest.
I’m going to count that as part of my spring diet transition.
.
.
What Responsibility?
Sometimes I question what my responsibility is to direct Asher’s activity on walks. I understand there are times when training a dog to heel –as in, to walk obediently by my side– I would completely be directing his behavior. That is not what is happening when I take him out to burn off some of his energy on a walk around our property.
These are times when I am granting him the freedom to be on a sniff-fari and to explore to his heart’s content within the confines of our property borders. Here are a few things that happen when allowing him to determine our agenda:
- Asher picks up a fresh scent on the trail and immediately decides he must follow it at the highest speed he can muster, regardless of whether it exceeds my top speed or not.
- Asher freezes and stares to find a squirrel that may be prancing around, oblivious to his presence. Then he dashes off after it, again, at the highest speed he can muster.
- Asher smells the hint of a rodent’s presence and turns into a crazily obsessed predator that must destroy the log or brush pile to get after the prey with the passion of a stray dog that might not find another meal for days or weeks if he fails.
More than once I have stood by and watched as mice bail out in an emergency evacuation as Asher attacks the far side of their quarters. It has yet to quell his impassioned battle against the wooden fortresses. One was an 18-inch log with a diameter of about 12 inches with mouse-sized holes in each end. He chewed on both ends of that log until his saliva was starting to soften the hardwood but he never came close to making any functional progress toward reaching a reward that might still be stuck inside.
Is it my responsibility to interrupt his useless battles? Am I being negligent in allowing him to obsess to such an intense degree? From my perspective, he’s getting time to chew, which he LOVES to do and which we encourage in the house with an endless array of chew toys. He’s getting his mind occupied and exercised as he tries to figure out what angle to bite from since the previous attempt didn’t work. If I wasn’t allowing him the opportunity, he would be in the house whining for something to do, so I figured I might as well let him have at it.
It gives me a chance to practice being patient while standing in the fresh air of the great outdoors, forest bathing, and listening to bird calls in the wind.
Yesterday, Asher went to work, not on a log, but on an entire downed tree trunk.
The snow below was all white when we showed up. The wood dust and shrapnel are what Asher has clawed, bitten, and spit out in his lust to reach some reward his nose seemed to promise.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I felt a little guilty at times during the 30 minutes he toiled away since he was working so fervently at a lost cause. Although, it’s kind of cute to watch his belief in himself as he thrashes against this ancient tree-trunk beast as if he actually stood a chance.
Honestly, whether or not it should be my responsibility to talk him out of these epic potential conquests of mouse houses, I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt because attempting to tear him away always creates a battle of wills that I’m barely capable of winning.
Maybe, just maybe, I’d be more responsible being a cat guy.
.
.
Different Sleep
A change of perspective is always a valuable experience for me and this weekend up at the lake we have been residing in the old cabin #3 beside the main log house above the water. It is one of the original cabins of the former fishing lodge that Cyndie’s family saved when the Wildwood Association transitioned to families owning individual lots.
The Friswolds moved cabin 3 to a new foundation farther back from the lake to make room for the new log home they had built back in the early 1980s. When our kids were young, we spent most of our time up here in the old cabin, granting people in the big house respite from the clamor of infants waking early and the occasional outbursts of either glee or angst associated with that age.
Currently, there are no young ones of the next generation in the family and cabin 3 gets used less often, primarily as overflow accommodations when attendance numbers swell for a weekend.
.
Cyndie and I are really enjoying the throwback to a time when our primary experience up at the lake was from the vantage point of the old, and much smaller cabin.
I have been sleeping deeper than in recent memory and with Asher left back in Beldenville with a sitter for this visit, we have no reasons to rise early. This morning the 8 o’clock hour had arrived before we got up. I had woken early and read the whole paper in bed on my computer and then faded into a morning nap that felt rather decadent.
The small rooms and close proximity to the ground (in the big house we usually sleep in the loft) make it feel like we are almost sleeping outdoors.
The view out the back window is one I relish for the trees and forest floor I’m most attracted to for a natural environment.
It’s as if I’m forest bathing all night long as I sleep.
.
.
Asher Digs
It is no surprise to learn that Asher digs after the scent of critters in the ground similar to the way our previous dog, Delilah did. Since the digging done by dogs is so destructive to our lawn areas, we spend a lot of energy discouraging digging in the grass. However, when on walks through the woods, I like to give a dog the chance to exercise their natural instinct. Yesterday, Asher plowed after something his nose told him was there.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
His efforts failed to produce any reward, but like Delilah many times before, that didn’t seem to matter. He just returned to the trail and we resumed our walk along the perimeter of our property.
Within a day or two of getting Asher home last week, Cyndie and I noticed he was adjusting to our regular routine more than we were changing our days to accommodate him. It’s another sign for me that he will be a good fit for the kind of pet we would like to have. After a bit of whining yesterday, he settled down for a good chunk of time in our outdoor kennel while we worked nearby. Cyndie was planting in her produce garden and I did my core strength and stretching exercises.
I recently read a recommendation that yoga routines can be enhanced by doing them outdoors and our philosophy of promoting the health benefits of forest bathing seemed to boost the idea doubly for me. This week I have moved my planking and stretching outside beneath the branches of two large trees. I’ve also made a change to the time of day I start, which doesn’t feel like it fits my routine yet but does offer a chance to linger in bed for a bit after waking. Slowly getting out of bed feels like a BIG luxury that suits me, even though working out first thing in the morning has always been my preference.
There are a few details I hadn’t considered when thinking it would be great to be outside. The mosquitos could become a problem and ants have already been a nuisance. The leaves aren’t completely opened yet so the sun was a little hard on my eyes yesterday. The ground not being perfectly flat is probably good in terms of adding difficulty for some balance routines but one particular bump interfered with keeping my back as flat as I wanted while stretching my hamstring muscles.
Speaking of new leaves opening up, I found this little specimen of baby oak leaves on the driveway beneath one of our biggest trees. They hardly got started and now it’s already over for them. That little sprig was about an inch across.
It’s sad to admit these brand-new leaves won’t even be missed. There won’t be a “bald spot” in the tree where they would have been. That tree will have more leaves than can be counted. At least we’ve given them worthy respect and have saved an image of them that will outlast all the rest of the leaves that survive them.
We are so very lucky to have all our trees. Looking up into the leaves when doing a cobra stretch is a great alternative to the ceiling of one of our rooms.
.
.
Admittedly Isolated
I’m home alone with the animals again this weekend and contemplating the incredible peacefulness and beauty that I enjoy the luxury of experiencing here every day. This morning the horses radiated peacefulness under a foggy wet blanket of sound-dampening air. It was Delilah who disrupted things every so often with her random barks of alarm over imagined threats that really don’t deserve to be barked at from my perspective.
As I methodically made my way around the paddocks to scoop up recent manure piles, my mind meandered through so many trials and tribulations that we aren’t facing.
Our country has not been invaded and bombed by a bordering nation that was pretending to be doing our people a favor. Our region has yet to be torched by wildfires or swamped by unprecedented flash flooding. Extremist politicians haven’t maliciously trafficked hapless immigrants to our doorstep. We are not experiencing a shortage of food or potable water. We are not struggling with the debilitations of long-COVID infection.
The much more benign burdens directly impacting me this day include two issues that aren’t happening as swiftly as I wish. I’m wondering if the technician who will splice our fiber optic cable at the base of the utility pole across the street from our driveway works on Saturdays. Nobody showed up by the end of the day yesterday even though the cable to our house was buried last Tuesday.
I’m also anxious to receive a promised bid from our favorite excavating business regarding the landscaping of the slopes on either side of our new driveway. We’ve decided the job is too big to accomplish on our own and will require a truckload of dirt they can provide. It’s been a week since he was here to discuss the issues.
It’s pretty easy for me to preach about having a positive attitude about how great it is to be alive when I reside in a sanctuary of natural beauty and affluent comforts. I am sensitive about boasting too assertively from our admittedly isolated circumstances in the world, but my perspective is coming from having successfully treated a depression that shadowed much of my earlier life.
Our daughter is enduring the stress of knowing a vulnerable adult who walked out of her music school before his father did and has now been missing for days. Our hearts ache for those who are suffering.
I walk through our woods to a soundtrack of calling birds and water droplets coming down from wet tree leaves, the autumn aromas of fallen leaves just beginning to become noticeable. The horses huff a big sigh as I show up to clean the area beneath the overhang and serve up their pans of feed.
What can I do but send the love I experience out into the universe to flow toward all who face difficulties that I struggle to fathom, recognizing the privilege of my isolation.
.
.
Forest Fun
Notice: This post includes content of carnivorous canine detail.
Walking in the woods at the lake is easy now that all the undergrowth has gone dormant for the winter. Allowing Delilah to explore every scent is a spectacle of mania. She can hardly contain herself in a rush to discern and follow the myriad options. Eventually, she did come upon one smell that overrode all others, a recently detached leg of deer.
After she closed her jaws on that prize, nothing else mattered.
We let her gnaw on it for a while and then I took her for a walk to see if she might decide to bury it somewhere for safekeeping. It was a long walk while I explored the wooded slope near the driveway in search of remains from a fort the kids and I constructed out of branches some twenty years ago.
I never found any evidence of our creative efforts now decades past and Delilah never let go of her prize.
When we finally made our way back to head indoors for a drink of water, I negotiated that leg out of her mouth and covered it with leaves beside the driveway for her.
Content with that for the moment, she gladly led the way inside. The next time we took her outside, we figured that would be the first thing she headed for, but we were wrong.
Now with both Cyndie and me setting out for a stroll with her, she seemed very willing to leave those bones for another time. We strode into the deep leaves covering the ground in search of the next great find among the trees. What we came upon this time was a new idea.
We want to create a small labyrinth path around existing trees in an area that is almost level.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
There are a lot of rocks available and a fair bit of old trash to clean up that contributed to our urge to pursue the possibility. It appears the old fishing lodge that existed here originally may have used the woods as their dump for trash at some point.
I stepped out dimensions and aligned an initial orientation with the four directions north-south/east-west and with each accomplishment, our idea gained merit. Late last night, we scanned labyrinth design options for something simple yet interesting and now will try to visualize fitting one of them around the trees.
This will likely be a project that develops over years to become fully established as we intend to keep the woods as natural as possible and have the circular pathways be noticeable, but subtly so.
A forest bathed meditative walking labyrinth seems like a very fun idea. Here’s hoping we can bring it to fruition up at our favorite place.
.
.
Conflicting Thoughts
There’s a battle raging in the available space of my brain between the wonderful goodness all around us and the repeated failings of improvement where the needs are well known. We just heard an update on progress to vaccinate for COVID-19 that lamented the low percentage of the neediest people receiving shots, despite the advanced knowledge that this should be the priority. Even when there is broad public awareness of the need to get the first vaccinations to the communities most impacted by the virus, insufficient effort to make this come about leaves things to play out as usual with the advantage going to people of privilege.
It is a lot easier to talk about what “should” happen than it is to actually enact the changes needed to achieve high ideals.
Sounds a little like the way things always go in our governmental system. Two-party politics for passing legislation advancing the lofty goals of a nation results in a lot of sounding off but very little in the way of bringing lasting positive change. Progress is slow for the poor and disenfranchised citizens of our country.
We have passed the 1-year milestone since the pandemic took over all of our lives and Cyndie and I have thus far dodged illness. Others we know have not been so lucky, including some who are currently suffering symptoms. We are sending love to those of you experiencing the virus first-hand.
News reports announcing crazy-high numbers of small earthquakes in Iceland, combined with several other notable recent quakes around the planet suggest something big is about to go boom. It’s a strange threat to contemplate from our relatively stable geographic landscape.
A strong spring melt is underway at Wintervale and the chickens are thrilled over the ever-expanding “tillable” terrain becoming exposed again.
The south-facing slopes are free of snow but the rest of the forest is still covered like the surfaces of an old-fashioned freezer. Walking the trails is a fascinating demonstration of how much chill emanates from the icy carpet below.
Delilah loves to pause and rub her face in the snow-cone texture. Her head was all wet at the end of a walk yesterday from rolling in the slushy snow.
It’s incredibly calm and soothingly optimistic with the promise of spring unfurling right before our eyes. The animals all seem giddy and I guess that is contagious.
It’s a welcome contrast to the more unsettling thoughts looming.
Here’s to visions of the days ahead when COVID sufferers can come walk our trails, breathe the health of our forest air, and hang out with our chickens for a while.
We’ll send you home with fresh free-range eggs.
.
.
Relative Something 