Let’s walk!

Or jog, or run, or skate, or bike, or whatever it is you decided to do.  This is the week for the group walk.  Pick any day from the 8th (today) through the 14th (Sunday), get out there, do something, and then blog about it.  Paint a picture of your walk/ride with images or words or however you want to do it.  Come back and leave a link in the comments on this post, (which happens to be this very post), and I’ll include you in a wrap up of all the walks next week.

Early morning walk

The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts.  This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggest that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.  A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making.

~ Rebecca Solnit

I’ll be taking a long hike later in the week.  In the meantime, I’m still taking my daily walks around the pond.  I went out early this morning, just before sunrise.  The ground was crunchy with frost and leaves.  It was our first frost of the season.

Fog was materializing over the surface of the pond, circling around and then pouring out into the woods and meadows as the sun came up somewhere across the street.

The fog always starts out low, just a few inches above the water, and then lifts.  Clouds returning to the sky.

Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn — that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness — that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.

~ Jane Austen, Persuasion

It’s almost the end of the garden season for us.  Everything that should and could be harvested was picked yesterday.  The green tomatoes will have to ripen in the house (although I do have a recipe for a Moroccan Vegetable Stew that calls for green tomatoes so I will use some in that).  We canned a half bushel of the ripe variety over the weekend.  There’s a pile of jalapenos to be pickled, but most of the peppers have been chopped and frozen.

The lettuce abundantly growing in the greenhouse-shed will probably be okay for a few more weeks.  Salads have become a regular staple around here.  Hot, warming, comforting soups are showing up on the menu now too.  I made a roasted garlic and butternut soup for dinner on Saturday.  Super yummy.  The surprise (volunteer) butternut squash that came up in the garden was generous.  They have all been harvested, and I’m looking forward to more butternut squash dishes, soups, and stews.

I roasted a beautiful head of cauliflower yesterday.  It was so delicious that M and I ate quite a bit of it while we were taste-testing.  Just a drizzle of good olive oil, freshly ground sea salt, and freshly ground pepper to flavor it.  The recipe mentions spritzing it with lemon juice, but it doesn’t need it.  It’s perfect as it is.  I’m going to roast some broccoli today.

There is a great comfort in growing your own food.  You are close to the soil.  You use the basic elements — water, sunlight, earth, air, and plants — for your work, your sustenance, and your pleasure.  You nurture your garden from seedlings to mature plants, tending, pruning, weeding.  Year after year, you see cycles come and go, from sprouting to harvest to withering, to seeding again.  You eat your plants to live.  You don’t mind and they don’t mind.  Some day, you will fall back to this earth, back into the sun-baked dirt, and you will become food for the plants.  It’s the way of all life, and it’s all very agreeable.

~ Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao:  Daily Meditations

That’s pretty much it from the Bogs for today.  Thank you for coming along on my daily ramble.  I know some of you were planning on walking today.  I hope it was a delightful experience, and that Mother Nature provided you with a few good surprises along the way.  And if you didn’t walk, I hope your day was delightful in other ways.

Walking… is how the body measures itself against the earth.

~ Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust:  A History of Walking

Cloud pillar

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