hiking in the city -

Living in a city, it's easy to become focused on all that concrete and asphalt around you. Streets and freeways and colossal cloverleafs and parking lots and multi-storied garages - they are all a vital part of getting from here to there within motorized vehicles - and you have to watch where you're going. This morning, I was lucky, handed the opportunity to focus on other aspects of life on earth. I got into my car, and turned the key and all was silent. The battery was dead.

So, I hiked to and from my destinations. The best part of this slowed experience of morning was that which was wild, striding along one of those natural areas somehow tucked along the sides of the road and in corners of a city, just past the noise and vehicle activity. The grasses were tall - they whispered and nodded now and then to one another. Wildflowers - lantana and a variety of silver-leafed nightshade - were tucked near the scrubby shrubs.  The breeze was mild, and fragrant were the clusters of yellow blooms on tree branches above me. Then I was past it, crossing multi-laned streets again and pausing on the concrete islands between the rivers of cars.

Later, I came upon a mom and four young kids out for a stroll along the front yards of a row of houses. With that brief encounter came another entry into realness, that which is timeless and reaches across continents. This may sound a little exaggerated for a moment with a mother and children walking in the sunshine and the shadow of trees. But I've been in the car a lot of late - in the world of stoplights and heated pavement, horns and brakes and truck engines in neutral waiting to exit a parking lot into the flow of traffic. This morning there was another true world that thrives at the pace of a youngster's meandering.