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The Threshold Season: What Mud Season Doesn’t Name
The bloodroot isn’t up yet.
That was what I went looking for on my first hike of the season in mid-April. My first hike in months and since receiving CAR-T treatment and spending several weeks in the hospital. I wanted to see if the bloodroot was peeking through in the spot where it always comes up, in the woods near the grassy stretch where the trail bends back toward Lake Champlain at Point au Roche park in very upstate NY. I was a little early. No bloodroot. No trillium. No wildflowers of any kind.…
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Bear Confusion Syndrome: The Emergence
There is a moment that arrives every spring here in the Adirondacks, usually sometime in April, usually without warning, when something shifts. The air changes. The light feels different on your face. You step outside and realize, with a small jolt of disorientation, that you feel alive again.
And then, almost immediately, comes the confusion.
You look back at the past several months and wonder: who was that? Who was the person who moved through the days in slow motion, who gained a few pounds, who responded to perfectly ordinary situations with a kind of gray, low-grade grumpiness?…
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What We Leave Behind on the Trail: The Art of Releasing
Glimpse Ahead: Sometimes what we find on the trail teaches us about what we leave behind. In this reflection, I explore how presence and movement creates space for release and how letting go makes room for what wants to emerge. But all leaving behind is not the same. The different ways we leave things behind matters.
The Bottle’s Story
This spring I was walking a familiar stretch of trail through the woods when something caught my eye. Nestled in the foliage beside the path, not thrown carelessly but apparently placed there, sat a bottle of iced tea, a Stewart’s Convenience Store, “Refresher.”…
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Three Kinds of Stones: What Hinders, Grounds, and Guides Your Journey
Glimpse Ahead: The trail we walk is never just about distance. It’s shaped by what we notice, what we carry, and what we choose to mark. Stones are not just obstacles in our path, they are meanings, memories, and messages. They’re weathered by time and transformed by presence. In this reflection, I explore the soulful symbolism of Stones: what we carry, what we stumble over, and what we place with intention. And maybe, you’ll notice that the stones beneath our feet are also within us.
When the Trail Speaks in Stones
You’re walking a trail you’ve never taken before.…