Wondering, Wandering, and Pondering

Today, I walked through part of the Cotswolds, from Chipping Campden to Broadway. Or perhaps that isn’t quite right...

Today, I wandered through a world that felt impossible.

There were butterflies and tall grasses and lambs beside their mothers. Ivy climbed ancient stone walls. Valleys opened below me, patchworked with farms and trees. Wildflowers lined the path in colors I couldn’t have imagined if I hadn’t seen them myself: purple flowers, pink flowers with white centers, bright red poppies, and dozens of others whose names I do not know. Fields were waking. Small green things were pushing up from the earth.

At one point, I realized I had been listening to the same song for hours. Over and over again.

Cheeks are rosy like a Boucher cherub.

I'm a strawberry soda, raise my lashes to heaven,

Stars in my hair running like a waterfall,

Clouds in the whites of our eyes, we saw it all.

This particular lyric had lodged itself somewhere inside me, and I couldn’t seem to let it go. It felt as though the song and the landscape had entered into an agreement with one another. The music became part of the walk, and the walk became part of the music.

At the beginning of the walk, I experienced something truly strange. The beauty was so overwhelming that I wondered if I might actually explode from the fullness. It felt as though more beauty was entering me at one time than I had ever allowed myself to receive before that moment.

Along the Way, every so often, there is a wooden sign carved with the words "Cotswold Way" or a small acorn pointing in both directions. Otherwise, you simply follow the path. You trust. You keep walking. And every now and then, something appears to reassure you that you’re still heading in the right direction. It feels a little like life.

At one point, I found myself approaching a magnificent oak tree. I had no idea how many miles or hours I had left, but it occurred to me that perhaps the tree marked my progress just as well as any mileage marker could. I am here. I have come this far. That is enough.

Another realization arrived somewhere between the wildflowers and the sheep. I do not belong to anyone but myself. The thought felt neither lonely nor rebellious. It felt freeing. Perhaps that is why, despite spending the day entirely alone, I have never felt more whole.

Lately, I have felt a strong desire to be seen. And yet here I was, walking through fields and forests with no one around, and somehow I felt complete, I think because I was witnessing myself. And perhaps because I was meeting everything around me fully. I didn’t duck beneath low branches. I let them brush softly against my hair. I didn’t pull my arms close when the grasses grew tall. Instead, I opened my hands and let my fingers trail through them.

And scattered along the trail were benches. Simple wooden benches, appearing exactly when they were needed. They felt less like furniture and more like gentle instructions:

Slow down.

Pause.

Look.

Listen.

Notice.

It also doesn’t escape me that I began this journey in Oxford, the city that gave us Alice in Wonderland. Today, I felt as though I had stepped into my own Wonderland, a place where beauty appears around every corner, where time behaves differently, where curiosity matters more than certainty, where the path reveals itself only a little at a time.

As I walked, I found myself thinking how fortunate I am to be a writer. The world can be painful. We all know that. But writers are granted a peculiar gift. We get to gather beauty and collect wonder. We get to carry home fragments of meaning and offer them to others. We are given the gift of creating other worlds into which our readers can escape.

Perhaps that is why days like today feel so important to me. They remind me where stories come from in the first place: from paying attention. From wonder, wandering, and being willing to follow a path marked only by the occasional acorn.

Sometimes life asks us to witness. Sometimes it asks us to participate. But every so often...and this feels like one of those rare moments...it asks us to do both.

Notice things, my darlings.

~ Shannon ᭄᭡ ͏ ͏ ͏

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