Walking

I don't sleep well during the early hours of the morning. Once my brain starts working, sleep is fitful, and I figure I may as well just get up. About ten years ago, I decided that as long as I was up I may as well do something healthful. So I started walking around 5am. For the first few years we were still living in Ukiah, a small city that is still big enough to have light pollution so I didn't get to see much of the night sky. Still, it was dark and quiet, a different place at that hour of the morning. The night sector of the labor force is just finishing up. The bakers are winding down, the paper carriers are finishing their routes, the truck drivers are lined up at the supermarkets. There is a kind of low level hum compared to the noisy traffic and twittering of commuter voices that will dominate in two or three hours. It is the world coming awake.

The discipline of walking not only gave me physical exercise, it also turned the restless churning of my thoughts into more productive activity. It is a great time to think and problem solve. Some of my best thoughts have come in that half light before the debris of the day's demands clutter up the mind. Unfortunately, most of this has radiated out into the universe on the back of the lost photons, never written down or recorded other than in my fuzzy memory. Too bad we don't have thought recorders.

When we moved to the country, I realized that the experience of walking the streets of Ukiah was but a minuscule glimpse of what walking at that hour could be. For starters, it is dark. It's not as dark as the moonless nights I spent in rural New Hampshire where you literally could not see your hand in front of your face, but it so dark that I can just barely see my white walking shoes. There are no street lights out here, and only a few houses have outdoor lights, thank god. On the darkest nights I can just barely make out the road ahead of me. Since there is only a car about every hour, I just walk down the middle or safely away from the dropoffs near the edge. It's easy to know that I am safely in the road because on the edge of the road my shoes begin to crunch the gravel that has been blown off the surface, a stone at time working loose from the asphalt.

I take a flashlight, but I only use it when a car comes so I can light the edge of the road without stumbling in the broken edge. The car lights completely blind me so I have to look straight down and hope it's an early commuter and not a late drinker. Fortunately there is usually one or no cars during the hour. It is so dark and quiet that I can hear most cars coming when they are still about half a mile away. Often the eerie headlights will light up the landscape before I can hear a car coming over the hill or around a curve. I'm sure all these early morning drivers think I'm crazy, especially with the hood of my sweatshirt almost always up, even during the cool summer mornings. I once had a nice chat with a sheriff's deputy who wondered what I was doing out there until he noticed how I was dressed and realized I wasn't a threat. I was glad he was there patrolling and doing his job. We joked about waking all the neighborhood dogs.

But the best part of walking out here is the sky. On those moonless nights, especially in winter when dawn is still a couple hours off, the sky is pitch black overhead except for a littering of stars as if broadcast there like grass seed. Each little seed bursting into a life of light. It's easy to keep track of our little part of the universe because there they are every morning, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and my favorite of all: Orion. I admit that I can't see any of the constellations except the really obvious, and Orion just can't be missed with that tilted square on his belt surrounded by most of the brightest stars in our sky. I follow his progress east to west across our morning sky from summer til the next spring, rising a little earlier each day. A few weeks ago, he was just peaking above the morning sky, barely visible against the already growing dawn. But by now, he is quite clearly visible well above the horizon before the first glow of sunlight.

Walking keeps me in touch with the universe in this way. Following the stars, the planets, the moon, the seasons. Marking time in this brief flicker we call life. It's a splendid backdrop to growing plants which are all nasty and wild, seemingly without discipline compared to the rigid mathematical precision of the cosmos. But they too have their cycles and they, without knowing, control my cycles. I am their Shepperd.