Finding the rogue fig tree

This is my last column. I’m moving out to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington to be with family and hunt new Thin Places.

Last week, my son-in-law, a logger, mentioned a wild fig tree to me that he’d seen in the woods. Finding it seemed like the right challenge as the final subject of this column. These 13 years of sharing unusual places has been an Adventure. First, finding all the specific trails, trees, waters, animals, birds, rocks and insects that generously act as guides to learning about the slow, near invisible rhythms that shape so much of what we experience and become. (In the medical world, it’s called “prodromal” and usually means “early warning signs.” But there’s a more positive spin: things are happening to us that we are not aware of, outside our control.)

Just being in the natural world, even the regular-backyard-natural-world, allows a different energy to seep into us, get absorbed and begin to become an actual part of who we are. We don’t have to seek it or will it, maybe just allow it. And something happens. Usually, it’s good.

So, after all the new and old hikes, walks, weathers, nature festivals, farm markets, sightings of natural wonders (that coyote last month, a hummingbird this morning), we begin to see, and expect, awe, beauty, fierceness, playfulness as part of our daily life. That’s a big deal! That’s mental health. We’ve learned with our nature guides to renew and recharge ourselves by being with the transient, the sunsets, the shadows; to appreciate unexpected encounters with both nature and people. We become our own Thin Place. It goes where we go and we share that sense of awe, wonder, resilience and mutual respect with others. Likely, we may start to plan and talk less... and wait, look and listen more.

Oh, I found that fig tree with one ripe fig left, and a feather near it.

A parting suggestion: Find the other parts of this Mary Oliver poem, “What Can I Say.”

“Inside the river there is an unfinishable story, and you are somewhere in it and it will never end until all ends. The song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child is singing still.”