3.00 in the morning is the time when anxieties about matters small and great may smother us. An early morning walk through a wooded park is a time to breathe fresh air and set our discontents in a larger frame.
These last weeks the possible re-election of Donald Trump has been one of the dark birds that visit many of us in the night. As with other such epochal events, of course, how we might react internally to it is of vastly less weight than its effect on the world. Neither early morning wandering nor anything else we can do will change that. But it might shape our response.
Walking in the park as the early morning sun lights up tree tops, magpies and blackbirds greet the morning, grasses sway in the breeze, and flowering wattle sweetens the air, certainly does make the alarms of the night seem smaller. To be alive in such a great and beautiful world is a gift that for a space outweighs the terrors of coming days and weeks.
The burgeoning and the dying of trees, the struggle for territory fought by mynahs and other birds, and the hunting to survive by insects, birds and animals, which underlie the serene beauty of the park set our own lives and desires within a cycle of life and death that is itself a gift. If Christian faith is part of our inner world, we might pause in wonder that we personally have been invited into this beautiful and complex world. Seen from this perspective the alarms and discursions of a far-off election in the United States might seem even unimportant.
Habitual walking encourages attention to the complexity of the relationships that shape life in the park: the intersecting relationships between sunshine and rainfall, between native and introduced plants, between people and paths, between temperature and emissions, between places of active and passive recreation, and between the ecologies of moist and dry areas of the park. The park is not only a beautiful and welcoming world experienced as a gift by an outside observer, but a delicate and fragile set of relationships of which the observer is part. As a gift it invites gratitude; in its complexity and fragility it demands respect.
Awareness of ourselves as both observers and participants in the park leads naturally to broader reflection on the distinctive place of human beings in the network of relationships that compose the