Sunday, March 7, 2010

Daily Practice 66/365

 
Title: "His soul lay fallow on the barren wasteland"
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Go for a walk in the forest, and there's no doubt you will feel better at the finish than you did at the start. For me that restorative power completely sums up the magic of natural places. I walked in a place called Mystic Vale this morning, just behind the university. The university is undergoing a complete power upgrade today, so the emergency power generators were working full force at every building, a constant mechanical noise that invaded the Vale. But...just keep walking, just keep looking and after awhile I realized I had moved completely away from the intrusive noise. Today I noticed the sand that's accumulated in the dry creek bed, which I find mystifying since the soil around here is not really sandy. I wondered where it had come from, how far the water had carried it before it accumulated in the little pools. As I walked back towards the university, the generator noise returned but was somehow less noticeable, not at all annoying. An object lesson in how noise is just noise, it's effect can easily be superseded by becoming absorbed in other aspects of one's immediate environment.

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