Pack Creek Ranch, San Juan County, Utah
Clouds, wind, snow flurries, 25 degrees
6 February, 2012

Astronomical matters: One goal for my year was to be somewhere special each month at the rising of the full moon. In January I went to Monument Valley, Arizona, for a spectacular experience.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, I planned to travel up to Dead Horse Point on the mesa rim overlooking all of Canyonlands National Park and the La Sal Mountains.
After all the weeks of clear winter nights we have clouds and snow.
So it goes . . .
But if it’s clear where you are on Tuesday night, take a look . . .

DOING THE STROLL . . . Just Looking, part 2

When I was a freshman in college I belonged to the University of Colorado Mountaineering Club. An energetic and virile bunch, status came with the number of miles you had hiked and the number of peaks you had climbed.

Sometimes, on a Saturday evening after a football game, we would gather and march madly off uphill in the dark just to see how many miles we could cover before midnight or in 6 hours. We wore counting gauges on our belts.
We were adrenalin-driven mileage maniacs, peak baggers.

For many years afterward I launched out into the Great Beyond in that spirit. Up mountains, down rivers, cross country.
Have a goal, a destination, an X marked on a map.
Get some friends. Go! Get there. Get back. Cross that off the list.
Onward!

That was then.
And this . . . is now. . . .
It’s not that I’m older and slower, but perhaps wiser . . .

Now I’m mainly a solitary stroller in the world.
A wanderer who stops and starts and doesn’t cover a lot of miles.
My goal is not to get somewhere and back.
It’s just to be outside wherever I am with mindful attention.
Not to go far, but to go well.
Not to go fast, but to go with a graceful slowness.
And to go alone quietly, not with talky friends.
Even the friends I like most.
Talky is for cocktail parties.

I think back on all I must have missed when I was goal-and-miles oriented.
What I never saw, never smelled, never touched, never tasted, never heard.
So very much . . .

As I write now I consider what I experienced this morning –

- the smell of wood smoke drifting up the valley from some far off chimney,

- well-built bird’s nests hanging empty in bare winter trees,

- wild turkey tracks that look lie arrows pointing somewhere,

- patterns of ice crystals that look like secret writing,

- the fighter pilot flight of swift finches across the sky,

- followed by a heavy bomber squadron of ravens,

- the footprints in new snow of someone else . . . also out alone,

- the taste of cold water scooped up in my hands from Pack Creek,

- the tingling shock of icy water splashed on my face,

- the foggy puffs of my breath pumped up and out of my lungs,

- and the sound of my own heart pounding in the silence of the bright day.

Taking an hour to cover a half mile is not speed hiking.
At most I’d qualify for a half-mile patch on my parka this morning.
Does it matter?
No.

As I write I’m reminded of three encounters I had in stores in town this week. Each with the same terse question and answer.

“Can I help you?”
“Thanks, just looking.”

How many times have I had that brief exchange in a store?
One salesman told me it was a typical guy response.
Sales people assume that a woman customer is shopping and is pleased to be asked if she’d like assistance.
A man usually knows exactly what he’s come for and goes right to it.
But if he’s wandering around, he’ll usually say when asked, Just Looking.
(Probably while his wife is shopping.)

There really is a difference between Just Looking and Shopping.

If you shift the venue from a store to the World, Shopping is a search process that suggest purchasing something to take home.

Just Looking is an attitude about being in the World.
Just Looking is a Way.

Its mode is random strolling.
Its timing is measured in slowness.
Its success does not rely on what you paid for something at the store, but what you brought home in your heart and mind and soul and memory.

Just Looking is free.