Transcript
This is Hudson Gardner. Welcome to Walk Around.
I went for a run today down to the water
It's windy
The gusts up to 38
The water was churned by the wind, which was coming from the east, and it was quite chilly
I ran about five and a half miles, about eight minutes per mile, 750 per mile
It was a good pace
I felt excited to be out there
And I got to a place where my thoughts kind of dropped
There's a big field that I'm living in right now, and when I got back to it, I ran down a little hill on a gravel driveway, and the field opened up in front of me, scattered with little copses of trees and glacial erratic boulders on little rises, little dips in the ground, a marsh, a pond, and along the edges, a big doug fir forest
And I came down into this little tiny valley within a valley on a peninsula within a peninsula
I saw a big red-tailed hawk sitting on a fence post, and he took off as I got near, and I felt this kind of buoyant feeling in my body as I saw him fly into the gusts
And it was one of those times when I run when my thoughts just stop
And it's not even that I'm happy
It's not even that I feel pleasure or joy or any kind of emotion, you could say
It's like I've just found a place of peace where all the waves of my experience have subsided, and I'm able to look down into the water and see how deep and beautiful it is. But just to look.
It's a really special moment, and it's why I like to be outside, and it's why I like to move outside
There's something really old about doing that, maybe older than anything human beings do otherwise, just being and moving outside
It's the reason I named this podcast Walk Around, this feeling, and it's a feeling that has never failed me
As I get to know the land here, it's a remembrance from when I lived here in this area three or four years ago
It was during COVID back in those days, back when COVID was more widespread and more people were affected and everyone was masking and no one was going seeing each other, and all the events were canceled
And so it was a strange time to move somewhere
Now there's more events than you can shake a stick at, and I've met more people in the last five days than I met in Vermont in the entire year that I lived there. Which is not to say there's anything wrong with where I was, but life is just funny like that
I wrote a poem this morning about friendship and memory, connection, relationships, and a little about the land here, and I wanted to share it today
It's called By Firelight
So here it is amidst the gusts and the crackling of the wood stove…
By Firelight
The moon above the fire Venus to one side, I look across at friends and think how are lives formed from such brittle matter, a connection relational, reliable, conducted through words and what was done a thin thread to rely on, but it's a sense that builds slowly in the body—thoughts go unneeded, it undoes them This quietude, as simple as a song a knowing in the body. A sense of ease in a gaze, firelight flickers in blue eyes, darts off glasses, glimpses across the flames. How lives are born, formed, subside, arise again. I like the flame, each shape clean, and new. What is burdened with memory set free into heat, and light
I hope everyone has a beautiful new year, solar, lunar, and so on
Thank you for listening.
By Firelight