Mox #2: Hold my hand big tree

Life lessons can be learned anywhere. Sometimes, it takes a couple of images to make a connection. Yesterday, at Pairie Creek State Park, north of Eureka, CA, I was bicycling on a silent serene forest trail immersed in the soft damp beauty of conifers on both sides just drifting by. Then, as I turned a corner in the trail, I met a giant redwood on the right with a diameter of at least 20 ft. It's height only a guess as it disappeared into the canopy. On my left were four more that had cloned perhaps before my great grandfather arrived from Germany. Together they formed a wooden cloudscraper. I, of course, stopped instantly in awe and in respect. What did these manificent plants have to teach me? That beauty can be huge? I already knew that. I pedaled back to camp.

A short while later I was sitting at the picnic table and on the road that curves past our tentsite I watched a grandmother walking rather briskly with her grandson returning from a visit to the bathhouse. The grandson had only recently discovered walking and he was so small that it was a stretch for his little hand to make it up to his grandma's. She was moving at her adult destnation-driven pace and his body was being helped along. He was in a different world, a separate zone, and was oblivious to where in the universe or the nation or the day he was. As long as he had his grandmother's hand and was connected he was free to think, to fantasize, to create, to breathe. So, as a young-old adult, I was reminded by this child and this tree that big solid for-sure things, be they a towering redwood or an anchoring grandma,are not only important, but actually vital to enable us to be who we are and who we wish to be.