This may be the most touching prose I've ever seen on Facebook, and of all subjects, it's about the natural world! An act of generosity from a pure writer who has published many books, including a recently wonderful one on Pantheism. But if you look, you'll see it's more than that:
Where an arroyo meets the dirt road, I stop
and look for tracks. A few feet up the stream bed is a nice set of
bobcat prints. There’s no mistaking that roundness, the leading toe, and
size of the front and back feet. I also see a fox print,
or maybe a small coyote. Foxes are on my mind since I saw three earlier
in the day, probably a mother and two kits who ran so quickly into the
brush I spent a few minutes questioning what I had seen. Foxes are rarer
since an outbreak of rabies some years ago. Was that a fox or a wish?
That’s one good thing about tracks. They stay there. You can admire
them for long minutes, imagining the animal who passed by, feeling the
tangible presence of a bobcat, a wild cat, short-tailed, ear-tufted,
delicately spotted, charismatic.
It’s another gift, the world showering us with gifts, the tail of a fox, tracks in the sand, clouds in the sky.
Are these clouds for me?
I feel the need to fall in love with the world, to forge that
relationship ever more strongly. But maybe I don’t have to work so hard.
Maybe the world is already in love, giving me these gifts all the time,
calling out all the time. I have thought nature indifferent to one more
human, to any human, but maybe the reverse is true. The world calls
out: take this. Take this. And this. And this. Don’t turn away.
From the inimitable Sharman Russell, a writer, thinker, and teacher. Thank you Sharman!
Kit Stolz 