A Faint Brightness

The day before we got back on trail, someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump. The ten miles of trail south of Nahmakanta Road are uncharacteristically smooth and level, sometimes for long enough that I could focus my eyes in the middle distance and let my body do the walking, while my mind worked on other things. I was trying to decide if going out in the woods on this personal adventure was selfish, what with The Way Things Are Today. But I wasn’t making much progress on the question. What can I do, as one person, about climate change, genocide, rising fascism and political violence? Would it be better for me to sit in my house and “bear witness” somehow? The only answer I could come up with was something trite about doomscrolling.

Fortunately Mica, my bard, interrupted these fruitless thoughts to tell me that he had downloaded some books of mythology, and he has a plan to read one myth each night and try to learn it well enough to tell it to me the next day. For his first myth he told me a Mayan creation story, in which I thought the monkeys were treated unnecessarily harshly. But that got me thinking about creation, which suggested a better question than whether this hike is selfish. Instead I wondered whether it‘s creative. 

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