Long Walks On Leafy Streets

1/5/2015 The Cemetery of Our Lady of the Snow, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
I have just finished my evening sitting. As mentioned in previous post, I sit for about half-an-hour just to clear the mind. It helps to make me feel a little bit calmer after all the activity of the day. Today is the first day of the new semester. Although I am still on sabbatical and today I was working from home I made a timetable for myself detailing all the activities for the day and finished most of them. It is very rewarding when that happens. One of them was, in the evening, taking out some of the compost and spreading it on parts of the yard where I plan to sow seeds in the spring. It was gratifying to see the mixture of food and plant material decomposed into nice black compost, although it was not as dry and powdery as worm-compost is supposed to be. I guess there weren’t too many worms in the soil there.
To sit down after a long day’s work always feels great.
I read on the back of a milk chocolate packet about a dairy farmer who works from 5 am until 7 pm every day. That is very inspiring. In my case I work on various things from morning until I go to bed but I don’t think I work as hard as the farmers. I take breaks in between, read the Internet or watch TV now and then. I do hope to reduce the amount of time I spend on TV and the Internet and devote even more of my time to research and study. But I must say that watching a game of Test cricket on the TV or computer with a cup of tea is very relaxing. In fact it is a good way to fall asleep! Friday night I was watching the game between New Zealand and Sri Lanka being played in Wellington’s Basin Reserve stadium. This stadium is situated near a bay and there is a road going all along the circular waterfront. I did some “remote tourism” by using Google earth to travel along the bayside road. People who live there are quite lucky. There is a nice bike lane on the road and there are people biking on the pleasant sunny day on which Google took the pictures. The stadium itself is built over a reclaimed swamp that in turn resulted after a strong earthquake raised the land underneath and drained the lake that used to be there.
TV also can sometimes be very educational. I watched a program about Chris McCandless, a young man who died in the Alaskan wilderness. Jon Krakauer wrote “Into the Wild” about him and it was made into a feature film starring Sean Penn. The story was inspiring but also tragic, in that his death could have been avoided. Apparently the young man had a difficult childhood and was trying to escape from civilization as much as possible, in search of the honesty and purity that he missed in his life. But it was inspiring how he was able to live by himself in the wild and on the road, often with the support of complete strangers. It gives you faith in Americans at the same time as giving a glimpse into a life lived at its most simple form, taking little from nature.
Nicole and I also got to see the movie “Wild” about a young girl who hiked over a thousand miles on the Pacific Crest Trail by herself. The views of the Sierra Nevada range and the Cascades is quite breath-taking, although my friend Chris who has done an even longer hike on that trail tells me that the movie doesn’t even come close to depicting the true grandeur of the scenery seen in person. The movie was also a lot about the young woman’s journey of healing from emotional trauma. It is a great movie overall even though the drug use and promiscuity is a bit jarring. The movie stirred up a bit of wanderlust in me. I wish I could be living in the wild for a few days, at least!
We did get to experience the beauty of nature on New Year’s Day. We joined almost a hundred other hikers on Sierra Club Outings Program’s annual hike on the towpath. Starting from Georgetown people walk along the C&O canal (search this blog’s past entries for what the canal and the towpath are about) for five miles and return. We walked two and a half mile and returned. It was great to walk along the river. The trees were bare and the view was even more beautiful.

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