If you get to the park early enough there’s still an edge to the air and you can imagine some nocturnal creatures stirring in the dark. By late spring when the brush leafs out it starts to fill in the forest and makes for good camouflage for the deer or bear to hunker down overnight.

At the park in the morning I am embodied but feel out of my mind. Not mindful, mindless, a kind of meditation where I can refocus my senses. There is the sound of the wind, an owl, a tree creaking, a woodpecker. The air is damp and a bit cool. Most of the sky is gray but in the distance some pink and yellow. The path twists through ferns, native plants, knobby trees covered in moss, some fallen or leaning. Against the gray sky the leaves on the tall trees make a tapestry pattern, a die cutout of shapes. The calming wind through the trees, the building sound of birdsong. A woodpecker peeling a piece of bark free.

This is the iron gate trail which is a terrible name for a trail. Who wants gates when you’re in the wilderness? But it’s named that for a section of rusted, bent gate left unexplained off the side of the trail mostly consumed by brush, easily unseen. I can get so lost in my thoughts it’s like I’m not here either. I often walk this stretch and don’t even see it.

I could not remember the word we learned when Lily was doing wilderness therapy, the term for how we interpret and regulate feelings in the body: interoception. They were trying to teach the kids how to develop that sense because research has made links between mental health and our ability to self-regulate through interoception. An area in the brain called the insular cortex that integrates information and affects how we think and process emotions. Funny I couldn’t remember the word, we talked about it every week. Must be blotting it out.

Maybe it isn’t about being mindless, but more about getting attuned to my bodily senses that helps me wake in a different way. Being alone in the woods helps me do that.

Today I met an old timer with an Australian shepherd, a reflective coat and headlamp, carrying a large club. We talked about the bear and coyote. He said oh I carry more than a club. I asked if he knew the runner who carries a riot baton and he did; I’ve been coming here for 20 years, he said, we call ourselves the Breakfast Club. On my way out I saw a club leaning by the trailhead kiosk, a smooth tree branch/wizard staff, and threw it in the car. It’s got tufts of moss on it and has the weight of a baseball bat.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Diary, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, mindfulness, pacific northwest