On the Huckleberry June 19, 2012

On the Huckleberry June 19, 2012

It is 10. a.m. and I am walking along the Huckleberry Trail on the last full day of Spring. Today, like most days, I will walk four miles.

Soon after beginning, I pass a grandmother picking wild raspberries with a young boy.
"Now you gotta make a pie!" I yell, surprising myself.
"I'm gonna make jam." She says, as we exchange smiles.

Wearing shorts and bare to the waist, I have "all flags flying" (all my nineteen tattoos are showing) In the distance, facing me, are two women and two toddlers in a stroller. They are stopped and the women are dealing with a 'problem'. One of the toddlers is crying, and one is being rebuked. Then the latter is crying too.

When I am two strides from them, the crying stops as the toddlers stare at me in amazement. (I surmise that if their dads have tats they didn't go 'tattoo-loco', as most folks think that I have done!)

Without breaking stride, and leaning slightly in their direction, I address the tiny faces staring at me so intently, and I give words to their unspoken thought:
"Who is that funny-looking man?" I say, as their mothers smile and I smile back.

I am grateful for another sweet Spring morning.
I drink in trees and ledges, brooks and wildflowers, butterflies and birds -the sensuous woodland odor, My mind goes from sensation to reflection and back again, from mindfulness to reverie.

The sensory feast provokes old memories, until, wrenched back by a clamoring of senses,I am again in this very moment,

My thoughts, like that yellow butterfly in front of me, darting back and forth, go from now to then and back again, gleaning sweetness from both places.

There is no great excitement in my life, no ecstasy, no bliss, but I am happy just the same,
finding my joy by the spoonful.
-jjorge

[the Huckleberry Trail extends six miles from Blacksburg to Christiansburg Virginia]