An errant twig slaps the side of your face. Stings. You cry out. Then with a curse, you shove the tangle of branches and leaves aside and continue hacking your way through the dense underbrush.

    You’re in the deep forest, the so-called strong woods. You’ve been travelling for days, months. You don’t remember when you weren’t slogging along like this. You don’t have a destination, really, just a general heading that has kept you moving forward, not quite sure why.

    Some days you spend wielding the machete, whacking through the impenetrable green wall. Often you’re forced to ford streams, climb steep hills, or go miles out of your way to avoid obstacles. Sometimes, rarely, you come to an open glade and are able to walk easily along fields of fragrant grasses and wildflowers.

    There is no time, just movement. Once in a while you check the compass and make small adjustments, not really knowing if they’re right or wrong, or whether the difference matters. You’re going somewhere. You’re on your way. You’re moving.

    Suddenly, a loop of root reaches out to rudely introduce your face to the fetid mix of leaves, mud, bugs, seeds, and twigs on the forest floor. The breath bursts out your lungs, you cry out, stunned. Eyes sting, overbrimming with bitter tears. You weep.

    When the tide of bitter frustration finally ebbs, you roll over onto your back. That’s when you see it.

    The roots that toppled you belong to a seventy-foot black oak whose broad bole reaches up from the forest floor to the distant sky. It’s perfect for climbing. Once you regain your wind you stand, reach for a low branch, begin working your way to the very top. An abandoned eagle’s nest makes a perfect seat. You settle in and take a look around.

    Now for the first time you can see the entire world. Your backpack and gear far below, shrunk to pencil dots. Behind you, trailing off for miles into the far distance, the path you’ve taken to get here. You see all the obstacles, difficulties, detours and false starts you’ve had, all the hard, hard work you’ve put in to get here.

    You gaze up at the immense cobalt dome overhead: white ships of cloud sailing across the sea of sky, the sun playing hide-and-seek as they scurry by below.

    You scan the far horizon: mountains, rivers, broad valleys, vast oceans, frozen tundra, endless prairies. You’re dazzled by the immensity of all you witness.

    You look forward in the direction you’ve been heading all this time. You can’t see anything. You don’t know what to look for, really, since you never had a clear idea of where you were headed. You don’t recall what you’d wanted to achieve, who you’d wished to become, what landscapes or experiences you’d hoped to encounter.

    Time expands upon itself as you sit there gazing and before you know, it’s late afternoon. The sun is an ember banking its fire off to the west. You climb back down and set up camp, cook dinner over a small campfire, then drift off to a dreamless slumber.

    With the morning, you can’t wait to climb back up to your perch. You bring food and drink, spend the day leisurely inspecting all the wonderful places and things within your view from above the treetops. When the sun once again too soon dips to greet earth with red fire, you retreat to your camp for the night.

    The next day you’re back at your aerie. The vague goal you’d been working toward, now glimpsed from this distance, seems to have evaporated into the morning mist. And it doesn’t feel quite so compelling now. There’s so much more here to see, to feel, to hear, to absorb.

    Then one day it happens. A little north of east, an impossible distance away, you spot something that fires the marrow in your bones. Something you’ve dreamed of since childhood but which you grew to believe was far beyond your abilities. Or maybe a melange of things you already love which your imagination has placed in the same room together. Perhaps an idea born of the view that you now command, the obscuring confusion of the forest now gone, so that you can see possibilities once invisible to you.

    Whatever it is, it is not at all what you expected. But it overtops your boldest secret dreams. You realize that you must do it, it is your destiny, all else is either wrong for you or too small for your spirit. Suddenly you feel more alive than you’ve felt in a long time.

    You climb down to the ground, break camp, gather your supplies, shoulder your backpack. Set the compass sight on east by northeast, draw a bead on a rock outcropping a mile away. You unsheathe the machete. With great joy, you take the first few steps upon on an immense journey.   

   I’m in the midst of a sabbatical now, at home recovering from a planned surgery. I had expected the time to be a chance to get some big projects past the hump and into some kind of finished form.

   That’s not what happened. Instead my days found me reading old Unca Scrooge and Donald Duck comics and binge-watching episodes of Firefly. Yesterday I was sitting on the sofa, hands clasped over my belly, the pads of my thumbs pressed together. I started playing a game, pushing my thumbs downward until my fingernails touched, trying to get the point of contact to line up in my sight with the seam between my thumbs. (Not as easy as I thought!) Another way of describing it is that I was twiddling my thumbs.

I was bored.

   And I recognized this as a good thing. Finally my mind was free of tasks, duties, obligations, projects, accomplishments ~ even those I supposedly loved. It is freeing to have the clutter of what we think we’re doing and who we think we are swept away, making room for the imagination to fly free with possibilities that we’ve been too far down into the forest tangle to see clearly.

   No great cosmic insights have stuck me like thunder. Yet. But then I’m not likely to be able to predict what will come of this time. But surely, if nothing else, I will emerge with a more grounded sense of the path that truly calls out to my very bones. The one I’ve been already traveling upon, or maybe something wildly different.