To wander and come home

I have quoted Mogli’s lyrics for the song “Wanderer” a few times before, and sometimes while I’m out there, they take me back and become relevant all over again. It’s like being a wanderer and to go home. Everything that creates stress falls away and is reduced to what is truly vital and essential for body, mind and spirit.

There was a time in the beginning when I first started hiking, that I was introduced to this feeling of coming home. I quickly became addicted to this feeling and I chased it, wanting to feel like this as often as possible. Being out in nature and becoming still is what made me feel this way. Away from all the hectic it restored balance and I learned to breathe deeply, to utilize senses that have always been there, but merely got lost in the background of noise. Never before did I feel these senses with such an awareness and consciousness as I did then.

All of a sudden, seeing was more intense. Seeing the little things we rush by so often, such as seeing a weed on the side of the road. You might asked what’s the significance of that! Well for me there is beauty in everything (except spiders lol) and apparently it is in many others who voted and made my picture of a weed #1 in a photo contest a few years back.

All of a sudden there was an increased sense of smell. The sweet smell of the forest, wildflowers and how the earth smells during and after the rain.

There was an increase sense of feeling the sun on my skin, the wind in my hair. Just feeling a different degree of being alive vs merely existing.

I’ve tasted wild berries and nature’s fruit, grown without pesticides. I remember the most amazing flat of strawberries, sweet and delicious right along the coastline in California. I ate them right out of it’s wooden crate, dust and perhaps a little dirt included. An experience we still talk about today, having tasted the sweetest and most delicious fruit to this day.

Time slows down and is simplified. It’s often a bunch of little things that one day become the big things in our life. Maybe this post finds you yearning for your own senses to experience such simplicity and wonder. Perhaps you can’t relate at all about the significance of a weed and why eating a flat of dirty strawberries is still a fond memory. Whatever the case, I hope you can witness your own wonders, to become a wanderer on this road called life and to come home.