"The Fifth Season....."

One trail, only a single small path it is, subtly leading into the trees, up from the valley floor, off deep into a northern canyon... One trail, easily accessible enough, and reasonably available for wandering during all four of our seasons. So each season I have visited there, with many reasons for heading up that little trail... Almost always on my own, in times needed for solitude, contemplation, and silence. Although with the overgrown trailhead it has, you would never really expect it to be there, as each season over the years has blanketed it so with even more foliage. It's almost as if the terrain itself wants to be elusive, and quiet, and set away from everything else... In winter the snow is deep there but navigable, the spring runoff is fast under the warming sun, summer can have a coolness too even amidst the hottest days, and fall in there is special as well with the changing colors and rustling of winds among leaves. While this little long trail recreates its' self with each season, it almost never seems really that different in other ways. Seasons may change there, but time slows too and becomes very still in those moments. Maybe that is why I wander there often, to slow my own life down, to then see, and feel, and know there are things in the wilds that have meanings deeper than the passage of a clock or calendar... That is how I was to discover, so long ago, that there is a fifth season out there too. A hidden season, a very elusive season, one only written or whispered about in those quiet special ways... This is the season that is just past winter, spring, summer, and fall. A fifth season. A part of and yet just beyond the other four. It is the time of stillness, of gentle first and last light, of a calming and a clarity. A season for emotions too that crystallize certain meanings, for remembrances of why we are both here and out there. A season that promotes quiet and contemplation. It allows understandings for whatever we each are seeking. It is especially a season of spirit. For all those ephemeral things that come and go, live and grow, change and remain familiar, as every other season does in its' own way. As adventurers, we develop an awareness of this season, the many of us who wander so, as it matters not really about the activity, time, or even the place out there, but then becomes so much more... It is a season of dawnings and sunsets within every moment, a season of meanings and memory, for all the mysteries and wonder. A fifth season it is, waiting so patiently to embrace every one of us with all its' gifts..... DSD

Appreciation as well to my fellow Adventurers for those two images of stillness and motion above.