
yesterday i saw a post from Leah that her Creative Every Day theme for October is earth.
EARTH.
i love nature, even though i'm not even a really an outdoors-y person in a lot of ways. i don't believe in organized religion, but if you ask me if i believe if there's something at work that's larger than egocentric humans, i have only to look at nature to know my answer. i'm awed by nature. it literally boggles my mind....whether it's the topography of the land, the vastness of its bodies of water, the species that inhabit it or the overwhelming space that surrounds it. nature blows my sh*t away.
this photo was taken in July of this year on a lake about half an hour from my brother's home in South Dakota. my brother spent the first 49 years of his life in Northern California. a year ago, he and my sister-in-law bought a home in a tiny village of 270 people and relocated their family to rural, eastern South Dakota. we all wondered if they were crazy, of course. what would they do there? surely they'll go mad from boredom, especially when winter weather rolls in and they feel trapped. this is a couple used to traveling (a lot) and often to metropolitan areas. they love fine dining and luxurious accommodations. my sister-in-law loves spas. they're going to go live in the country?!
this summer i spent the first two weeks of July in South Dakota, visting my brother's family and enjoying certain parts of South Dakota and western Minnesota. one evening my brother said he wanted to take my niece and i out on a lake, to go fishing for walleye. here's where i should interject that i'd never been fishing. i'd begged my father to take me fishing with him once when i was about eight, but when we got to the riverbank and he told me to put a worm on the hook, that was the beginning and end of my fishing career. whatever i'd imagined fishing to be, it didn't include touching worms(!) or touching fish or having to take them off the hook. then and there i decided fishing wasn't for me.
my brother is not only an avid sports fisherman (and has been since childhood), he was even a commercial fisherman for years and had his own commercial fishing boat. fishing is probably his #1 stress reliever. the man loves to fish.
fast forward 47 years. okay, maybe go forward reeeeeeallllyyyy slowly. forty-seven years later there i was with my brother and niece, hearing myself say, "i'll go with you and enjoy boating on the lake, but i don't want to fish." my 12-year-old niece, an excellent fisherwoman since she was tiny, looked at me with a puzzled expression and asked, "why would you not want to?" good question, kid.
i don't have to tell you how this turned out, do i? my brother said he'd take my fish off the hook (should i be so lucky to catch one). it turned out that i loved the whole zen experience of it, was sort of a natural at it and ended up going fishing with him in the Black Hills of South Dakota two more times. i caught fish every time. guess what? i love fishing. i still don't want to touch the fish (or any worms, thank you very much). but to sit in a small boat on a beautiful lake and cast my life (<----look! "cast my LIFE"...boy, if that isn't telling) and just wait? where do i sign up?
sitting on that lake in rural South Dakota that warm July evening something hit me: when was the last time i was in nature where there seemed to be no one around? we were the only boat on the lake that evening. there we were, just the three of us, sitting quietly as the sun set, lines in the water, waiting for the walleye to bite. and i got it...why they'd moved there...why my brother had wanted his family to experience that sort of life.
i lead a very quiet, often solitary life...on the surface...if you were a fly on the wall. but i fill my head with a firehose of information. i watch very little TV, but i consume a lot of social media. even in my blogging circle, we often about creativity. but making art (creating something tangible) is still an act of doing. how often we forget to just be. to just stand in our environment and do nothing...except feel the ground beneath our feet and the wind blowing our hair and the sun warming our skin.
so thank you, Leah, for making me think about the earth. i'm going to take her theme to heart this month...to see if i can redirect my focus from that firehose streaming into my head...to the earth beneath my feet.
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