2022-09-16

This a post in the “Georgia and Back” series, placed back into the time sequence, like Parksland Pt.I. We are at the Parkland Retreat Center, we left off here:

Friday Sept. 16th. Morning:

The temperature has been good all night. So, no clothing needed. We slept under our down quilt. With body heat, it felt ideal, bare legs hanging out creating a nice fresh draft in the morning.

I got up once, just naked in the night air and the smell of the forest. I couldn’t see many stars. There is just too much canopy up there, as the trees cover the steep hillsides of this canyon passage. I did enjoy the moon and one planet, a very bright Jupiter, seemingly nearby. The tree’s moon shadows were fun.

This morning, I lie comfortably in the fresh air, as it passes through the net tent. Outside, it acts like rain and there is a cloud above. Should we put the tent cover on? As I lazily watch, the rain only comes from the trees anytime the breeze blows. It’s just the moister and condensation dripping off of a leaf and falling from upon high. This isn’t Arizona humidity.

Sometimes, the slightest burst of airflow is followed by an errant brown leaf. I listen to a bird call and the cricket’s occasional claims. Generally, it is so silent, it is not to be heard, but to be felt. Here lies the still sound of peace. It is in-between sounds, permeating everything including myself. I noticed it last night, as I played a few licks on my guitar. When I stopped, it seemed to amplify the calm silence of the forest. I’ve decided today, to just let the guitar sit in its canvas case and honor it.

The light is directed by a huge cathedral-like canopy of Alabama pillars. Trees are like tall ship masts. Light is reduced to shadows with beams spotlighting the verdant foliage.

In the morning, the humidity had me thinking that there was fog, but it was a sleepy fool’s dirty glasses.

The stream meanders by, a flat sheet, with occasional ripples of a single bug. Where water reflects the golden hews of light, a floor of glowing flat sheets of rocks are arranged in various sizes. Sometimes this morning presents a haze and a hint of a rainbow above the brook. Eventually, the haze has gone, rising away.

It is pleasure on that rock in that creek. I revisit it, and then later again. But a body has a need to move. It’s what it does. A verdant sprig attached to moss, moss attached to rock. In the stream things will grow in place.

Me, I’ve got to move.

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This is a section in the To Georgia and Back Series. It is out of sequence. It had to be delayed while waiting for “N” magazine to publish the version that I wrote for them. Their policy gets it first. This is an expanded edition with more photos to match this website’s format.

Thursday September 15th, 2022

We’re in the backwoods of northern Alabama. Life here feels like something essential…

…The stream continues to slowly flow by, all around me. 

As I sit, I can feel the density of this rock. This one is solid, smooth like steel. It has no grain. It feels fundamental and secure.

This is a place of wisdom, a place to sit, to just be. It drops hints into my mind while I’m not looking. It teaches, “Just be here.”

A leaf falls from a tall tree, down on me and then the rock, whose world I have been invited into.

 A voice comes out from inside of my being, “Thank-you.”

At Parksland Retreat Center. there is a half of a mile of this stream running through the forest’s canyon. There are dozens of acres of solitude, surrounded on three sides by the Talladega National Forest. My mind has associations of the 40 years since I was last in this state. I hear from inside “Alabama Getaway”,” Sweet Home Alabama,” “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” I think of “Easy Rider” and rifle racks, as I drive down the interstate. Times have changed.

After wandering nude in the small sedan, through increasingly rustic back woods, we find the name of the street to turn off onto written by hand and unofficially, on the back of a stop sign at a quiet shady intersection. The directions become clear from here on, as the pavement becomes chip-seal and then graded dirt, and lastly a trail sprinkled with gravel into the woods.

We arrive to find a parking lot at the rustic gate and see that there is no vehicular traffic after this point. There is nobody about but a small troop of black chickens minding their own business in the brush.

We’re early, having traveled from Georgia and forgetting the time zone change. We decide to explore, after all, we’re expected and there is a compelling joy of free nudity after a week amongst the textile world.

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