Lakelse Lake
Today I went for a walk on the Twin Spruce Trail in Lakelse Lake Provincial Park. One year ago my daughter and I arrived here to camp for three weeks until we got settled in the nearby town of Terrace. It was our first home here so it has special meaning to me
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I remember walking the trail with a park interpreter last year when it all seemed so new and unfamiliar. Although I had lived on the west coast for many years, the Pacific Northwest felt different, perhaps more rugged and wild. I was so inquisitive and curious
about all the new life forms I had not previously known. I am sure I slowed the group down by asking so many questions and stopping to see, smell, touch everything along the way! I also recall feeling a little bit uneasy in this unfamiliar environment and stupefied by the colossal size of everything, especially the cedar trees, spruce trees and devil’s club. Today was different, I still felt stupefied by the colossal size of everything, but I felt relaxed and more familiar with my surroundings. I was glad I still feel enchanted by this place and that it hasn’t lost its mystique and charm.
about all the new life forms I had not previously known. I am sure I slowed the group down by asking so many questions and stopping to see, smell, touch everything along the way! I also recall feeling a little bit uneasy in this unfamiliar environment and stupefied by the colossal size of everything, especially the cedar trees, spruce trees and devil’s club. Today was different, I still felt stupefied by the colossal size of everything, but I felt relaxed and more familiar with my surroundings. I was glad I still feel enchanted by this place and that it hasn’t lost its mystique and charm.“For Merleau-Ponty, all of the creativity and free-ranging mobility that we have come to associate with the human intellect is, in truth, an elaboration, or recapitulation, of a profound creativity already underway at the most immediate level of sensory perception. The sensing body is not a programmed machine but an active and open form, continually improvising its relation to things and to the world” (Abram, 1996, p. 49).