This bridge, in the park where I often walk, has become so much a part of my internalized normal, and part of what I love about this park, that until I just now looked at this picture that I took this morning, it never struck me that it could look unwelcoming or pointless to the uninitiated. Because at the end of the bridge is a closed gate. And it is in fact a locked gate.
So it's a bridge you cross simply to then have to stop. And that sign you can see makes it clear that you are not to try to get over or around the bridge.
But I love the bridge because I think it's pretty. It's solid. I use it to do stretches. I look over the edge to watch ducks, fish, turtles, and when I'm lucky, a heron. I love to stand or lie down and just look at the sky.
And I love that closed gate that says "KEEP OUT."
Because it also says "WILDLIFE REFUGE."
I love that right here in the middle of a big city is a place set aside for wildlife. Wild life.
"We need the tonic of wildness" says the all-natural rose-scented facial tonic I bought at Whole Foods mainly just because I loved that quote. It's from Walden, by Thoreau, who went on to write, "At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."
When I was in college, an English major taking an American Lit class, I remember writing either in a paper or in my journal, that I thought I had been a Transcendentalist all my life without knowing it.
Well, I know more now and would not say that. But perhaps it's fair to say that I'm a Transcendental-ish Christian.
At any rate, I chose the bridge picture to represent yet one more transition, one more moving from one place to another, in that I really do hope to start writing more again. It feels as if my brain, and thus my mind, have recovered enough from the thesis writing and then the neck surgery I had this spring, to be able to write again. I even kind of feel the itch.
And for now this blog will be a sort of wildlife refuge for my writing, still meandering here and there. It's a mystery to me, a bit of a wild thing, still, where it may go.
But any readers are welcome to walk the bridge-- and you may also open the gate.
