Spirits and Demons

This was the first morning that our house's furnace turned on.  It's the best season of the year.

I put in just down from the four span truss bridge.  It's the only bridge over this part of the river for many miles in either direction.  I suppose it keeps the riff-raff away.

I headed upstream.  The weather service predicted light variable winds.  They were variable right in my face and they weren't exactly what I call light.  It didn't seem like I would make my objective, which was about six miles upstream.  But, just as it started to build to grimness, I would find myself in some little dimple of shoreline and the wind would die...  just long enough for me to think it wasn't so bad.  This repeats several times.

It is a beautiful autumn day with dense puffs of cumulus clouds in a sharp blue sky. I spook a few Great Blue Herons, getting close enough that I don't see them until they fly.  There are also some Mallards and Common Mergansers, but this is not a river for great bird watching.  This is a river for losing oneself in the paddling.  It's a march of distance, perhaps peering up into the forest, but mostly it is steady motion that lets thoughts drift in, bounce around, and maybe melt away, or not.

Lovers' Leap

I showed some friends a sculpture that I had made of a Huldre.  The Huldre is the female of the hidden people in Norway.  She lures men away; she is the folklore explanation for someone that has gone into the forest and never returned.  She looks nothing like my own forest spirits, but it is the best I could do for the uninitiated in such things.  My own forest spirits are voices only. I am well aware that the spirits are inside me and not "out there."  It's just that it takes some real time in a forest to have that stuff surface - I can count on one hand with fingers to spare the number of times it has happened.  Anyway, I spend the next hour thinking about spirits (good) and demons (bad).  My demons are "out there."  In fact they're real people that I once worked with, so to speak.  It occurs to me that the reason they are demons, to others as well as myself no doubt, is because they have no spirit.  I think about the demons and realize that they are all surface and no interior.  When I think about who they were, I notice that they spent all their efforts on how they appeared to others.  They would've have been terrified of spirits. They were good at making other people miserable.

The wind dies off as I get farther upstream.  I hope that this is a lay-of-the-land effect and not a change in the weather.  I turn at the mouth of Lover's Leap.  The wind gradually picks up as I head down.  I have to look at the map and study the hills to figure out how they can make that much difference.