There is nothing like a solitary walk to clear your head and remember what the true order of importance in life really is.  To see things again, to pray and marvel, to smile and to breathe fresh air.

  Because all of the things I worry about really don't matter.  Not in the eternal scope of it all, not even in the whole of my life, not in the way that I seem to think it will in the moment.  Money, success, people's opinions, failure, disappointments,  loss... it all doesn't hold the weight that I give it, not really.  Not like joy and peace and fresh air and life and love and grace and forgiveness do.  And I have those, or at least the ability to find them and dwell in them and share them.

 And then there's beauty too, the beauty that I live in and have the ability to make.  The beauty that I daily fail to see because I'm so busy trying to see ahead into what I can't know yet or live yet.  The beauty that can heal and soothe, that carries the joy and the peace and the love and the life that I'm supposed to fight for.

I know all this, none of these words or thoughts contain anything new or hold any life changing "revelations".  But the woods is the best place, I've found, to get reminded again of it all.  It's exactly like one of my campers said this summer, "the woods is just good for my soul"  to which all I could say was, "yes it is Riley, oh... yes it is."