Outside

Disclaimer: There's nothing new here. You've heard or read this before, and if you persevere and read on, you will not learn anything you didn't know before. Your mother probably told you every day of your pre-adult life to go outside and play. I am here to salute her wisdom. So stop reading and go outside!

It's Sunday around midday, and I'm taking a walk after church out by Alumni Creek Lake where Plumbline Road ends at a trailhead that leads directly down to the water. It's a sunny, windy fall day, and I welcome the quiet as I trudge down the short trail to the shore, just beginning to unwind from my own mixed reactions to my own social existence.

Reaching the tiny beach of round rocks, sandy mud, and thousands of shells the size of fingernails, I followed the shoreline around to a little inlet where I meet another male human about my age wearing waders and a backpack, carrying a fishing pole, fit as a fiddle and smiling. He says nice day, I say beautiful, how are the fish? He says if I catch one, it'll just be icing on the cake, and he strides across the mud and stones to make another cast in the lake. He clearly isn't there to accomplish anything in particular, and fishing is just an excuse to be outside for a while. He sure isn't there to talk to me, nor I to him, so we happily go our separate ways. I found a sunny spot out of the wind at the edge of the woods and did a long qigong form facing the water, and it worked like a charm.

Meaning what, exactly? It stretched my hamstrings and lower back, of course, reconnected my head and arms to my shoulders (I hate it when they fall off), and opened up the hip joints that tend to get tight as a drum. Physical stuff like that. Just spending half an hour standing in one place - especially a place in the woods facing the water - clears my head of some of the accumulated junk that's been trapped inside while I've been trapped inside four walls and a roof. I don't meditate in the bogus sense of "think about nothing" because a thousand images and problems race across the liquid crystal display screen of my mind's eye while I'm lifting qi up and pouring qi down. Afterward my mixed reactions don't seem quite so dire, and the same images and problems float in a more balanced perspective. I really don't know how it works, but it has something to do with getting outside.

More often than not as I drive to church on Sunday, I wonder what's the point of even going. An hour later, more often than not, those questions are answered well enough to reinforce the habit of showing up. For example, a young couple brought their baby girl for a child dedication - like a baptism for anabaptists. We had a simple bread communion, which I appreciate in its concreteness; we break bread together. Without fail, Rev. Susan provides a nugget of information, interpretation, call it "spin" if you like, that makes a difference in my day and week.

I'm told that the people we traditionally call "the Pilgrims" (note the cap P, as if they held the franchise on pilgrimage) were a band of Protestant (ditto) Separatists (ditto) from England via Holland who were blown off course and landed on Cape Cod by accident, so they pretty much had to make the best of it. I'm also told that about half of the folks on the fabled seed of democracy called the Mayflower were a cohesive group (the 'saints') who really chose to make a community together; the other half (the 'strangers') booked the voyage expediently to make a new start for their own reasons and had little or no commitment to the goals of the core group. Even the 'saints' had one core principle in common - separatism! - so they mostly wanted to be left alone, too. Hence the need for the famous Compact written onboard ship prior to landing on the fabled Plymouth Rock (evoking images of the apostle Peter, solid foundations, lasting institutions, and trustworthy insurance policies).

I found it helpful to know that this struggling band of separatists had very little holding them together, and in fact had little desire to be a tightly knit community. And while I appreciate the opportunity to attend, and I usually have a nice conversation or two, I was not compelled to join in the convivial silent auction/bake sale afterward. I had to get outside.