Walking On through the Foothills of the Nonviolent Life 

I am walking in the sprawling woods that hug the southern edge of Puget Sound.  In every direction the thick tangle of firs and maples are knitted together by an endless riot of waist-high ferns whose lime-green fronds stand out sharply in the dreamy languorous pall cast by the forest’s crowded canopy.

The trail is narrow.  It gradually descends toward the water, but circuitously: skirting a ravine, giving wide berth to a cluster of trees that look old and solemn with their weathered bark and the graceful bending of limbs as they rise.  A heavy storm has moved through the area this week and, though it is not raining now, the rich, black soil is moist.  My boots sink slowly into the damp earth as I near one of the creeks here.  Crossing, I scamper up from it and then connect again with the trail that heads me toward the sound.

Then, suddenly, as the trail swerves west, piercing shafts of lights break through the upper branches of the trees.  I am dazzled by these shards of sunlight that have appeared so unexpectedly.  Sharp, unrelenting, translucent, these bursts — which seem to make everything else so much darker— strike me as precious and even miraculous.  I spent a good part of my life in California – San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland — where sunlight, no less a miracle, could often be counted on, expected.  Not always, but often, I would lose the edge of wonder.  This is not possible here in the Pacific Northwest where there is often the thought in the air that a rich and somber and enveloping darkness is somehow always at the edges of things.

Now, as I begin to descend more rapidly.  I will soon be at the shore with its stones and barnacles and views of another peninsula and islands and, to the southwest, the undulating hills of the Capitol Forest.  I am struck with silent gratitude for these brilliant and stunning and fleeting bits of light.