Hiking.

All Those Miles

Can I even do this? Open curtains in the morn-
Somehow, I get through this often tattered, rather worn.
Pull the strings together for a world made out of roots,
Know that I will venture as I’ve tied my hiking boots.

Space age navigation in the console of my car-
Just to find the starting place, as if we had come far.
I leave my earth-bound spaceship for the world that always was.
Some instinct is my reason and I call it “Just because.”

Stretch as all us creatures do to navigate our home,
But I seek metamorphosis that happens when I roam.
A healthy dose of water and I start out on my way
To yet one more adventure that I always call “Today.”

Scenes unfold and yet, am I the viewer or the screen?
Sometimes there’s a passerby who might know what I mean.
Climbing over countless miles but I won’t call it “Far.”
For all the landscape covered somehow ends back in my car.

Everything is living- such a fraction that I see.
I wander like an asteroid and some life orbits me.
A rather strange intruder, but I exercise my right
Like everything, to be here although mostly out of sight.

The miles with all the trees and grass, the earth, the roots, the stone.
How easily the mind forgets that I am here alone.
I read the tracks, I hear the songs, I smell the breeze come through;
My footprints sign the guest book telling I have been here too.

John H. Bidwell