What Peace the Waters Bring : A Late Day Walk in Waterside Proves Mindfulness in Nature Heals

My fingers are still cold as I type this, me just back in from a glorious, late light walk at Waterside by Pownal Bay.

Funnily or not, I dashed out the door to drive our youngest somewhere before setting out on an hour to myself and in doing so I managed to forget my sweater and jacket but somehow brought a vest and toque along.

It wasn't until I got to my destination and pulled over on the red clay road facing a late day brilliance of water that I turned round to grab my warm things and I realized they were home in my entry on the dryer where I set them to put my hikers on.

What to do? The temperature had already dropped five degrees in no time and with the dwindling light it would only get colder.

But a walk was in desperate order so I tugged on some hope, popped my vest over my blue flannel, tucked my mass of brown/ grey hair into my toque as neatly as I quickly could and jumped out into the embrace of this place where farm meets marsh meets red clay road meets little woods and I began to walk.

Always when I start out on a walk my hypersensitivity to the new environment kicks in...and too oft it causes me anxiety.

Wait...shit...is that woodsmoke I smell? I wondered as smoke tendrils swirled from someone's wood stove down to the water's edge and faint, up to my nose.

Like quivering Dory in finding Nemo I often have to urge my scared self onward...Just keep swimming...Just keep swimming...it may be better a little further down the road...just wait and see.

So I did just keep going and in a few short minutes the light odor of smoke was gone and I welcomed myself to notice that fear had risen, peaked and dissipated like the smoke itself. Good training for someone with a hyper- reactive nervous system and body in general...and though my fears are not unfounded...(a recent severe allergy attack put me on prednisone and made me the proud new owner of not just a puffer but an epi pen too)...the woodsmoke allergy is real as are many other troubling allergies my hypersensitive self must navigate...but the second arrow of fear is just not helpful...or necessary...so I must cultivate judgement as to when to push and when to retreat...but I digress.

I walked the short distance along the bay too quickly...there was another walker coming in the opposite direction towards me and several vehicles down from the Trans Canada driving as though they thought they were still on the Trans Canada...so before I knew it I was at the trail entrance...a trail I had not been on since last spring...a trail that clings to cliff edge along the snaking shoreline of the bay and is lined with evergreens and apple trees and just begs for you to enter its shady, quiet domain before opening a distance in, to golden field and a vista of bay water.

This is a trail I rarely walk on alone...usually a kid or two along in need of beauty's offerings...And it is a trail that runs on private property but we know the brother of the off- island land owner and were kindly given permission to walk it.

Once, when one of my daughters and I were on it a few years back, we startled a man walking two terrifyingly large, unleashed dogs. He looked very surprised to see us and it was clear that he was trying to stop the dogs from devouring us with their aggression so we did not take time to explain our presence. Ever since then my walks here have an element of "whom might we meet here" and not only humans but wildlife as well.

This trail that clings to the cliff edge of the bay on your right when entering the west end and heading east has a fairy- tale like forest to the left or north of the trail. The sort of mixed woods that is part evergreen and part hardwood and all resting on a boggy- type soil bed... is home to trees that like their feet wet like birch... and home to so much wildlife. A little woods that, like the trail, calls out your name in birdsong and fern fragrance. This is where my son has heard so many magical bird calls in springtime that it seems hard to believe such diversity could inhabit a small woods and yet it does...or did prior to Hurricane Fiona hitting us hard in Sept 2022. Fiona which uprooted so many wet-footed trees here that it now looks an impossible to fix tangle.

But should we fix it and what does fixing a tangled wood like this mean?

We have heard that there may be an eventual clear-out using large machinery...this makes my heart hurt for all the creatures that do still live here...like the ruffed grouse I saw this evening on the shadowy trail when I first walked in or the snowshoe hare only a few meters further in. I know that Islanders favourite arborist, Gary Schneider, had said at the time when Fiona first hit, for people to leave the windstruck woodlands as is, as much as possible, to preserve what habitat remains and possibly provide new habitats. Still humans have an idea that when they "own" land they must keep it tidy and fire safe.

Sigh. Humans.

As I walked along I jangled my car keys though the likelihood of coyotes here at dusk is not so great as the trails we usually walk closer to home. Trails that we have heard coyotes on. Trails near the neighborhood streets that coyotes have been seen wandering. And not just coyotes but suspected coywolves as well.

Our son, the avid naturalist that he is, spotted one in the area when he was just fourteen. They shared quite a time together as he stayed with his camera set up in the snow and the creature, too large to be a regular coyote, checked him out from every angle. My son was not afraid; rather trapped in awe but the photograph he got and shared provoked a lot of fearful comments from townsfolk. Made me think of the scene in Beauty and the Beast...when the villagers all cloaked in fear and fervour, light their torches and begin to chant: Kill the beast!

I walked out of the trail and into the field and stood at the grassy edge overlooking the water. Everything so peaceful it made me melt like honey on a wet tongue. And yet I knew I was there because there was still a beast within me.

Kill the beast! a desperate strangle within called out as a scrawl of birdsong permeated the air and I stood silent watching the shimmering waters bob with little black heads of harbour seals. Harbour seals whose slick, thick bodies we frequently see basking in the sunlight on the remnants of the old wharf at low tide but the wharf was drowned in water and I felt half drowned too.

Please, please help me know how to be at peace and not bring harm while honouring myself... I begged the sky, the sand, the very earth beneath my planted feet.

I begged as though the sky might part its darkening and beam a light right through me so I'd know that I was heard.

And yet I knew it is not the sky that ever answers but the process of the questioning itself.

That was why I landed there. That was why I stopped and bowed and begged. I want to be the peace this world needs, the healing I so deeply desire for self and other.

But what shape does this peace take in someone wired like me and are there tolls to be paid in the doing?

Tonight the tide was high and still lapping higher in to shore. Though I had waterproof footwear this was not an evening to hop down the goldenrod strewn grassy height of cape, as my nimble father urged us all to do by his example on a walk last year. No, it was not an eve to tromp across the mats of black and tangled seaweed back to where the sand meets riverlet meets roadside. No, this was an evening for sinking down into here on my haunches in a deep squat so I could rest my elbows on my knees and let my hands come together in prayer position; a benediction to all that this place of quiet presence holds.

Of all the nearly impossible feats that were accomplished the world over this day, including the simple act of bravely facing the day when times are difficult, the grace of a sunset urgent and sweetly glimmering, splayed out on the waters of the bay here won me over in a moment.

How, how I asked the sky, can you hold so many colours at once? How can you let them pour forth so generously all over the waters here so that my own very human, half -broken heart breaks at the staggering beauty? And how do you manage to let yourself be with such abandon that the sea is rollicking your splendour to the shore?

It makes me want when I see such beauty. I wish I could be so gracious as to be satisfied with such an astounding display of self but it makes me so hungry for more that I wondered, as I squatted there, if I might devour the whole scene and then be devoured myself by the want remaining.

What is there to do in such a moment but bow to it. Let it wash you down until you are no more, no less than everything that you have become immersed in.

Who are we in such moments?

The eelgrass there was a wash of burnished copper tinged with a lick of gold. Green still, around its ankles or did the late light and water play tricks on me? The waters lapping, grey and silver, gold and pink betrayed the shoreline. What is sunlight here, where does sky end and water begin? And if I am reaching out to this and it to me, where do I begin and end in this equation?

And what exactly happens to us when we betray ourselves?

Oh bless-ed, bless-ed place this is that granted me such release to wonder and collapse. A place where I can be so much more than the limited self I came shivering at first with.

But wait, good lord!...it had somehow gotten to be late light and I was still in the woods on the little trail.

The sun long since having abandoned the sky there, its wash of fuchsia stained the steel grey like a perfect watercolour painting. Late light, the sun had set and there I was blissing out still in the woods. How old am I? Seriously, a grown up?

I popped up from my squat and moved back to the trail. The squirrels I maddened with my presence were happy I had left but the snowshoe hare I glimpsed in a tangle of undergrowth frozen in fear now was less happy that I was where it wanted to be as darkness neared. Golly...a still tawny hare who was so close I could have tossed my toque on it but that would have done neither of us any good and I was half frozen from my own time of stillness.

As I headed out I heard a tractor on the clay road, barreling along with what must have been a trailer clacking, creaking, heavy with its load. But I was light then in the near dark. I was light so I forgot to jangle my keys the way back out as I was taken by the aromas I encountered...seasalt, swampiness and on the clay road again the odour of cow manure laced with woodsmoke.

No phone with me or flashlight, I hustled back to the car and almost didn't notice the waterside flowers still nodding, late season, late light: mustards, asters, evening primroses, clovers, the species count was down here from midsummer but these stragglers did not fail to delight.

Whatever troubled self I may have arrived with, I happily left somewhere along the bay.

Lessons learned.

The restless longing still with me but the loathing more settled. I cannot heal this world unless my own heart is reconciled more with life. Acceptance and compassion are my cornerstones going forward. The red clay road and trail along the bay, yet again my anchors as I remembered to pause and notice breath.

I gentled myself back home, more frozen but far less tangled than when I left.

Thanks for reading,

Be well, friend!

Jill

An addendum in posting this let me acknowledge a dear friend in California for whom the smell of woodsmoke is also very problematic but for whom the horrifying menace of wildfire is far, far too near, at present. Sending so much strength to G and all those affected by current fires and terrors. xo May they be granted a forgiveness of wildflowers, post fires, as we have been granted a forgiveness of purple aster here near everywhere a tree was lost. xo