Today it snowed at least five inches, which gave me a chance to catch up inside, and review photos from the last weeks of this mild and gorgeous autumn. Most days I woke Topaz from her mid-morning nap on the sunroom table to invite her out for a walk. She’s going a little deaf, so a gentle touch on the side of the basket and she startles awake with a little mrrrp!

It takes her awhile to get going once she steps outside. She rolls on the flagstones and stretches, while Wren and I zigzag through the woods close to the yard, noticing details. I call to her occasionally: sometimes she hops through the gate and runs to catch up, but most of the time we’re well on our way before she shows herself.

Some days she doesn’t join us at all. Yesterday I thought was one of those days, so after awhile I gave up on her and we ambled eastward, from one lovely view, one magnificent tree, to another.

I’ve been practicing a meditation instruction I heard a few days ago, to remember, just for a moment now and then, the felt sense of being “without a care in the world.” The woods is the best place to do that. I don’t think of myself as stressed until I realize how that feeling used to be much easier to find.

It’s healthy to now and then shrug off worries about health, mortality, money, the collapse of democracy, and recall that carefree feeling. I was immersed in it. We had wandered on deer trails for half an hour and were pretty far from the house, the canyon in sight. I sat on a log for a short meditation. A quiet mrrrp interrupted my reverie, and Topaz jumped up next to me. I was delighted to see her. She’d been stalking us all along.

Once she had gotten enough appreciation she wandered away and that was my cue to get up and move again. I let her and Wren dictate our route.

There’s an avenue of ancients near the southeast corner that came to my heart to visit, so I steered us in that general direction. The junipers are evenly spaced down a gentle slope to the canyon rim. A couple of them appear to be around the same age, five or six hundred years or older, and some younger, just a couple hundred. The series below shows more than one angle on each of the trees.

I got to the bottom of the avenue and realized there was another tree in the line that I had not once in thirty years understood. It was just below a rocky ledge, at the top of the scree that angles down to Ice Canyon. As I considered the whole slope, I experienced the feeling of this next tree slowly sliding down the edge as rock eroded over centuries. Its powerful roots kept it anchored and it reached upward even as the earth carried it downhill.

I turned, and for the first time followed the sight line uphill from that tree along the avenue…

… and then I turned again and followed it farther downhill, to another tree I had failed to recognize as the last in line, barely hanging on above the drop into Ice Canyon. I wallowed in awe for a long while without a care in the world.