Sometimes in our journey home we have to be far enough away from it to return with new eyes. Call it what you will, a repentance of the soul and mind, or fresh, new ways of seeing. In my journey to the Pacific Northwest I pushed myself (with my family) as far as I could to the ocean in the Olympic National Forest. The beauty of the Northwest is captivating. When you’ve grown accustomed to the dry desert that seems to cry out for and devour any moisture that Mother Nature will gift it, it’s astonishing to be in a climate where the clouds generously pour forth rain and the ground is so bloated that it expels the moisture in creeks, rivers and waterfalls. Gushing from its green crevasses like unhealable wounds, the land bleeds forth currents, that in Arizona, it might as well be liquid gold.
Rerooting
One of our planned stops was a hike in the Quinault Rain Forest. This nature trail was drenched in beauty as the light rain turned to heavier rain, which turned to hail on us. Again, while for some this may have put a damper on one’s day, for us wandering desert dwellers it was a delightful adventure. As the trail curved around with the river, something caught my eye, tucked away off the trail of moss covered trees. It was a peculiar tree that had taken root atop a huge tree stump. The stump would have been quite old when it was cut down, as my arms couldn’t have wrapped themselves around it. The new tree’s roots have grown down and around the top of the tree like an octopus, seemingly continuing the more ancient tree’s legacy of upward expansion. I couldn’t help to think about my journey of pilgrimage home in heart, mind, and path, where I’m trying to remember the ancient and even those things that I think may be dead. To remember, and re-hope – and to wait in that space, to find what kind of re-creating and rerooting Creator wants to do in me there.
