Thursday, November 13, 2008

Chapter 6. In which the author's inner druid emerges




Most mornings I round up a dog or two (depending on whether 15 1/2 year old Ally feels up to it), and walk through the neighborhood along Travis Country Circle. Just walking the street is pretty scenic these days, as the light shines down through the oaks and other trees along the street, as you can see in this first photo.

I usually walk down to Blue Valley Park by the headquarters of the Travis Country neighborhood association, which has a nice man made pond, which you see here, that runs between a ridge and a dry creek bed.

As you can see in the next photo, taking a picture of a rather active dog with the simple camera in an iPhone is a dodgy business, but this is Ti, my enthusiastic walking partner.

I am not sure she pays a lot of attention to the scenery, but I am very fond of it. I have a hard time getting enthused about exercise in a gym, on a human equivalent of a rat's running wheel, but there is something very good for body and soul about getting out and walking out of doors.

In fall in Austin, if you walk at about 7 am or 5 pm, or ideally both, the quality of light is quite amazing, as this photo shows. It illuminates all the trees in an almost magical way.

It definitely highlights my ongoing love affair with oak trees. When I went to university at Stanford, and was a pretty enthusiastic jogger, I would jog out to the foothills in back of the university and run around through the California scrub oaks that covered the hills.

You can see a nice shot of those foothills in a photo I borrowed from the Stanford U. website.

I remember some folklore at Michigan State among people who had been undergrads in the 1970s about a legendary, maybe entirely folkloric student group called the Zen Druids, who worshipped the oaks that weren't there. I think I can see why the original druids of Great Britain supposedly worshipped real oaks (we don't really know that much about druids) -- but they are much more impressive than a golden calf, for instance.

Sandy reminds me that she had some transcendental hours with the giant pecans on Lake Austin a few weeks ago when I was out of town. She assures me that it's okay to get mystic about trees. If you want a good riff on this, go look at Kipling's poem, Oak and Ash and Thorn.

http://sniff.numachi.com/pages/tiOAKASHTH.html

1 comment:

LivelyClamor said...

The Zen Druids is entirely possible.
There is a delightful book about ancient, Revival (1800s-ish) and modern groups calling themselves druids. (Actually there are a lot of delightful books.) But you might want to check out "Bonewits's Essential Guide to Druidism" (Isaac Bonewits, Citadel Press, 2006) for a lighthearted discussion of druidism in the 1970s (lots of it from various colleges) as well as the other pieces in this puzzle.