This evening, I consciously declined to make an after-work plan to go running, even though it’s with my sweet Forest Park running group and I’m sure I would have loved it. But I’ve been gone for almost a week, and I’m about to be gone for four more days, and I kind of wanted space to just see how the evening transpired. Sometimes too many plans makes me a cranky stasia. When everything is already mapped out and all time is spoken for, what happens to the spontaneity and exploration and discovery that fill my soul?
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(who knows what you’ll find, heh)
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So after work, I thought I might just bike home and run on my own at Mt Tabor, but as I was riding I felt the pull of Marine Drive. I don’t know how to describe this other than that biking home means I need to take one direction, but sometimes the other direction feels appealing for no particular reason that I can explain; it just feels like the way I should go. I’m sure there are a million subconscious things that go into that feeling, but I don’t know what they are. But it felt right somehow to bike west on the Marine Drive bike path today rather than south through Delta Park which is what I would do if I was just going home. And without anywhere I imminently needed to be I had space for whatever random whims. The gut-feeling approach to unplanned time.
Once I was headed west and away from home, I figured I might as well check out Smith and Bybee wetlands to see if the osprey nest there has any osprey on it yet — the first osprey I saw in Portland this year was on March 22 (3 days earlier than the last few years:) but I haven’t seen any actually nesting near me yet. So I wondered if any of the other nests I know about have any takers yet. It turns out that yes, there is an osprey on the Smith and Bybee nest! (Welcome home, Smith and Bybee osprey!:)
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(and random boats on the bike path)
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At that point, I might have turned around and biked back homeward on the Columbia River Slough path, something I do semi-frequently when I take the long way home. But again, my whim was like, but what if you just kept riding to Kelly Point Park? In part because now I was curious if the Kelly Point osprey nest has birds on it yet (spoiler: it doesn’t, and the nest is actually gone). And also because, I don’t know, maybe the sun and clouds were pretty in that direction, or maybe there wasn’t too much traffic so Marine Drive was actually kind of quiet, or maybe my soul was feeling westward today — who knows, but it just felt right to go that way.
And on and on with the random twists and turns. It was an evening of play and whim-following that resulted in riding almost 50 miles just to go to work and come home. AND it resulted in seeing a fricken beaver on one of the paths I took, just casual as can be. It let me get close enough to it that when it finally slapped its tail and dove down as best it could (it was not in deep water, ha), I got splashed from the slap.
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(fully unzoomed picture of a beaver right before it slapped its tail and splashed me away:) I wasn’t even actively trying to sneak up on it; I’m just standing at the edge of the path)
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(also, one of many lovely trillium bunches at Pier Park:)
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So all of this is to say, I’m sure I would have had a lovely time if I had just planned to and then gone running with my Forest Park peeps. I’m sure I would have come home delighted at an evening run with friends. AND, this unplanned adventure time does something for my brain and my soul that I can’t quite explain but makes me feel alive and like the world is full of wonder and beauty and possibility and that I am the luckiest person in the world that I get to pay attention to and uncover it all. So, it’s a pretty great thing that no matter what, this evening was likely going to be awesome, but I’m extra delighted by a few post-work hours to play and discover and be full of awe <3 It doesn’t always have to be a big adventure that makes a day or a life feel more sparkly; sometimes just doing unexpected things on the way home from work is enough.