“We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.” ― David Brower
Damage to this pathway is clear, having been greatly eroded by storm surge. Please use the pathway responsibly by following all directive and warning signs. Thank you.
Begin with the intention of using the surrounding plants and the natural world to reduce the influence of stress in your life.
Take a moment to come into the present moment with the following exercise:
From where you stand and using only your sense of:
Sight-Identify 5 different colors
Hearing-Identify 4 different natural sounds
Touch-Identify 3 different textures from plants, trees, rocks, etc.
Smell-Identify 2 different smells-the sea air, the fall leaves
Taste-draw air into your mouth. Do you recognize a taste?
Acknowledge the past while living in the present and looking toward your future.
Take this moment to explore your own legacy:
What events have led you to this time and this space?
Are you where you want to be?
What would you like to see as your legacy?
What if home begins as simply as a bucket? With light flaming
the trees toward morning and a familiar rocking weight, home
swinging at our side as we go about the chores. Home knocks
our leg into the rhythm of our footsteps—lulling, bruising us
to a terrain we have already memorized, cartography we now know
without knowing, like the curve of a lover’s temple, how it fits
flush to our palm: each rut in the woods trail, each concrete
crack in the sidewalk, every expanse of field or lake below snow,
granite screeing mountain crests, granite spurring the coastline
to chains of cliff and island, our strength indistinguishable
from our beauty, our beauty rooted to our hardness, rooted
to this glacial till and soil beneath our feet. Chop wood, they tell us
when times are hard, carry water. And so we do, and some days
it seems we do nothing but carry, have been carrying such a long time,
and the bucket in our hands is plastic, probably, reddened
knuckles around a cracked grip, or the bucket is galvanized steel
or the bucket is spun aluminum, but before that it was wood
and before that it was animal hide or it was birchbark or it was not
a bucket at all but a basket—woven strips of the brown ash tree
or the reed, ashindi, its earthy scent carried across the Atlantic
from Somalia to weave again a new carrying, home held
in the knowledge of hands teaching new hands; for in this vessel
we carry cinders, ashes, which are the spent remains of yesterday’s fire
but also the memory of its warmth, and in this bucket are the words
of our ancestors, the stories our ancestors told in their languages
which maybe we never learned to speak, though we carry
the recollection in this bucket, along with the harms done
to or by them, carry it inside the silences we did learn, carry it
with dirt and rocks, with manure, woodchips, sawdust, rivets
and welding rods, with a ship’s manifest or a changed name,
a broken treaty, mulch or wilting root-ripped weeds, carry with grain
for the chickens, with grain for the pigs, with salted herring to bait
the lobster traps, carry with all the ghosts and bones of our history,
with the maps history has made of our ghosts and our bones,
carry in this bucket with the sweet scent of frost-burned apples,
with the clear cold sugar the maple trees bleed in the spring,
with the water of the Penobscot, the St. John, the Kennebec,
the Androscoggin, with peonies cut and glistening nectar,
their heavy blossoms both home and food for the ants, carry
along with some root vegetable we have dug fresh from the earth,
planted and tended with our own two hands, potatoes or carrots
perhaps, or the foraged green pungency of ramps or fiddleheads,
some gift we are carrying now up this steep hill or along the street
as a promise to our children or their children, carrying to eat
or to store through another winter, carrying separately, each of us,
but all at the same time, carrying still across each new day until
our carrying becomes a chorus—a linking, a lifting, a gathering—
this offering we share with those we love, our arms outstretched
to one another as we say, Here, I have brought you a taste of our home.