On a rainy day, sometime in April, I went for a walk in the woods at Mission Creek. This was only my second time in the park. I was excited to come across this little piece of uncivilized land so close to my house. The words on the pages of my notebook are smeared from where the rain drops collided with the not yet dry ink. The notes that I took that day are a bit jumbled but I thought I would start this post by recording my notes in chronological order.

• If we were to slightly expand our definition of what a voice is we’d realize that all life speaks.
• I am overwhelmed with the matrix of birds conversing wildly, the riot of green sets fire to my brain.
• In the distance I hear a goat crying out. The buds of the huckleberry look near identical to the berry it will become after flowering.
• Some trees pull up their roots, the look like gentle monsters living in deep time, each small step taking hundreds of years.
• I am now sitting at the apex of a muddy hill surrounded by red alders; their leaves exploding out into the world. Is consciousness the same thing as thinking?
• Galway Kinnel says:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                A girl and I are lying                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 on the grass of the levee. Two                                                                                                                                                                                                                               birds whir overhead. We lie close,                                                                                                                                                                                                                         as if having waked                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   in bodies of glory.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           As I write down the poetry of others, sages now in the ground, a bee buzzes by my ear and I want to ask her, “Where are you off to in all of this rain?” Everywhere I look, bodies of glory.
• I exhale and smoke leaves my lungs.
• What if listening became a full body experience. A plane screams low across the sky, a sharpness in my brain, wide angle gone pinpoint.
• I have managed to get myself lost in a downpour. I am hiding under the branches of a great, two trunked Western red cedar. Even here I can’t keep my paper dry. The curse of loving inky pens and walks in the rain.
• I look around at the waste people have left behind. Dr. Pepper, Mountain Dew, Starbucks. No kind of a doctor, neither mountain nor dew, and the canopy here is too dense for the stars to show through.
• In this sort of rain, I feel like lives are darting by, hidden in my peripheral vision.
• Life is in the air. The waves of it radiate outward in smells, sounds, sights, and tastes. Even the presence of the occasional mosquito is comforting. I was just chased away by an angry bee!
• I am exiting the park via a different path than I entered. Entrance or exit, it is all a matter of perspective. If this is an entrance it is a different entrance. If it is an exit it is a different exit.
• The Sun is out again. It warms my shoulders and casts my shadow far in front of me. It pulls the water from the ground in wisps of vapor. The Sun is touching me, I can feel it. I am in contact with energy that was born from the Sun, traveled through the deep, dark silence of space and ended its journey here, upon my shoulders.
• How phenomenal. I can still get lost!
• I wonder how long it will be before I again recognize where I am.
• After lots of walking I finally make my way out of the park. I ask someone for directions and am directed right back into the park and told to keep following the path to the right. As soon as I enter the forest I feel lost again.
• The Sun is still shining but I am walking in the direction of swollen, dark, fast moving clouds.
• I pass a dog that resembles a wolf. He is in a too small kennel and shares the backyard with two wooden cow cutouts. Such a brutal shaming. The predator lives in a cage while the wooden cutouts of prey are the kings and queens of the yard.
• Poetry happens when animists pray.
• An account of the conversation between my boots and the mud: “Squish, squish squish.” Without the participation of both parties (boots and mud), this conversation would have never taken place.
• The singing of birds vibrates my ear drums. My ears resonate with the language of birds.
• Cherry blossoms or snow? Gnats or tiny birds?
• For the first time in a couple of hours, I am confident that I know where I am. I smell the skunk cabbage at the same time as listening to two red breasted sapsuckers as the converse. A fly lands on my left eye, I swat it away and the birds vanish.
• This time, as I leave the park via the entrance/exit that I know, I bend over and pick some self heal and to press into my notebooks, where hopefully its name will prove true and I will heal myself. The purple flower leaves a stain in my notebook.
• I pass a house with a mailbox shaped like a colorful parrot.
• In a curved world there is no such thing as a straight line.

Getting lost is a wonderful way to blow open your perception.