Every year, for 22 years, in the last week of September, I headed up to Algonquin Park in Canada to paddle. Most years I paddled alone. I want to tell you about a particularly profound morning.
The day before I had pushed myself. After several lakes and portages, I’d tried to paddle to a large lake on the other side of a ten-mile swamp, but as night started to fall I’d only gotten about three quarters of the way through. I found a campsite on a small point that jutted out into the marsh. I was so tired that I didn’t bother eating. The next morning I was up, stiff and sore, before the sun. I built a fire in the semi-darkness, made coffee and a big breakfast, and packed up the canoe. I set off just as the sun started to rise over a distant hill. The marsh was eerily quiet and foggy. As I paddled slowly, gently, so as not to disturb the silence, I heard a whoosh, whoosh from the wings of a big bird. A Great Blue Heron emerged through the soupy fog. It saw me at the same time I saw it, and quickly changed course. I just sat there and soaked the whole scene in. Sitting alone on the swamp that morning, in the eerie quiet, it felt like I was witnessing the birth of the world.
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The passage above is from the upcoming “Journaling as a tool in the creation of a life”. It will be available as an insert in the Journal Meditations binder, as a softcover wire-o bound book and as a PDF. Both will be available for pre-order sometime in the next week with delivery anticipated late this month or early next month.
There is more on these sets on the Journal Meditations page on the Zen Mountain Journal website here.