Going Back to the Secret Garden

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Washington is a relatively green city and I'm incredibly lucky to have a good 10 km of trails right beside campus that meander through lush, mostly undisturbed forest.

On my run through the trails today, I decided one of the best things of being a baby would be not to have to watch where you're going - with someone carrying you or pushing you in a stroller, you're free to take in everyting around you. So, in a jealous attempt to regain that privilege, I decided I had done enough trail running to be able to do the same while running.

At first it was amazing! Tree trunks completely covered in leafy vines looked like overgrown pillars in a secret garden; I mavelled at them for a little while, with the beautiful yellow backdrop of leaves and the occasional crimson red tree appearing out of nowhere, like a burning bush. And then I tripped over a root.

That didn't stop me though: I started examining all the different twisted roots on the forest floor. I went from feeling like a baby crawling through tunnels only visible to me in a forest of adult legs to feeling like a giant trampling through a village of grasses, acorns, shrubs, etc. Then as I turned a corner, there were hundreds of yellow leaves falling out of the sky, foreshadowing the millions of snowflakes soon to come. As I sprinted, trying to catch them, I twisted my ankle on a rock. Time to start walking back.

Even more so than on the way there, I constantly felt like I was lost: "I can't have run passed that bench dozens of times and never noticed it"; "no, I don't remember ever crossing any bridges"; "I thought there was only one spot where the trail came so close to the street"; but sure enough, I had seen all these things dozens of times, I had just never noticed them.

As I emerged from the forest, running again, it felt like I was no longer part of that magical world anymore: it was now part of mine. Seconds later, I passed a man with one of the wretched leaf blowers blowing the leaves off a tree so he could blow them into a pile and dispose of them leaving a nice clean lawn. Sure there's nature in the city, but it only grows exactly where we let it and in ways we want it to.

So next time you're in the forest, when no one's looking, hug a tree and tell it it can grow wherever and however it wants :)