She knows I love to hike, though saunter is more the word that describes our pace.
Because I am irresistibly drawn to places where beauty, wonder, and awe abound, to be inspired as with Descartes’s portrayal of wonder as ‘that sudden surprise of the soul,’ (“Wonderstruck – How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think” by Helen De Cruz), and she wants to be wherever that is if that’s where I am, she bought a pair of hiking shoes.
Bless her heart – and heal the blisters on her feet.
Without complaint, she kept her hand in mine all the way down to the river and of course all the way back up, joking afterward that her pauses often were not for her benefit but for mine.
We didn’t hear the song of the Swainson’s thrush, sometimes known to the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast as the bird whose song is said “to make the berries ripen.”
It was too early in the season yet – the salmonberries were just in bloom – and besides, the thunder of the falls drowned out all other sounds.
Throughout our adventure, and especially as we rested at the river prior to our ascent, together we reclaimed that of which Helen De Cruz wrote: “what makes life worth living.”
“What we find wonderful and valuable in our lives,” De Cruz observed, is often discovered where beauty, wonder, and awe abound.
Especially when side by side.
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