Life and Times at Cranberry Lake

This blog is about the life, wild and otherwise, in this immediate area of Northeast Pennsylvania. I hope you can join me and hopefully realize and value that common bond we share with all living things... from the insect, spider, to the birds and the bears... as well as that part of our spirit that wishes to be wild and free.

Saturday, August 03, 2013

The Id... or was it The I.D.

I was coming home from the lake a few days ago and looked down at the well trod path, and saw a loose piece of bark, and from my height, it looked like "ID" was printed into this piece of bark.  I like odd things like that, and picked it up and put it in my pocket.


Several years ago, I was stopped my a similar feeling about an ash log that had succumbed to the Emerald Ash borer.  It looked like a message in Egyptian hieroglyphics had been carven into it, as it was stripped of its bark, and showed their intricate paths in an almost coded way... that was too large to put in my pocket, but nice accent to the side of the trail, so I simply took a picture of it.  I think I wrote about that or put it on my Facebook page.  People commented on it, too.  It looked so like a mysterious message.

I thought of this when I put the piece of bark in my pocket.  I thought of it like when someone requests to see your ID.  Like the stores that ask for it from my 80 year old husband... "Like... hey, he's over drinking age.... Really, does he need proof?"  Funny if he hauled out this piece of bark... Well... maybe that is a stretch.

Then as it sat here or there in the house when I'd unloaded my pockets, I thought of a girlfriend I had years ago that would read messages into things.  We were in her living room with housewives of professors [That would make a good live TV entertainment] and I was like a fish out of water with her crowd, but flattered to be treated like a peer to this intellectual group.  They viewed a print of a famous black and white sketch attributed to one of those old Roman artists of whose pictures, though prints, they prided on having up on their walls.  Someone saw a skull in the picture.  They all gazed on it until they saw the same.  "It must mean something," one exclaimed. "I wonder if the artist meant to have it interpreted into his piece of art."  [They probably said it far more intellectually.  I merely thought it amusing that they'd all gasp and wonder about this skull seen like a child's puzzle to find out the hidden bunny rabbits in its coloring book.]

Thinking about hidden meanings it struck me... that maybe the message of the picture was: "Your id is alive and healthy on your walk in the woods."   I looked up exactly what the id meant in psychology: "The id is driven by the pleasure principle, which strives for immediate gratification of all desires, wants, and needs."  Wow... I wish I could share this with my old friend and the who is no longer in this life, and  the housewives of professors... "I found 'my id' alive and well, on the trail in the  woods." How appropriate, as it immediately gratifies all of my desires, wants and needs.  I need no vacation from here.  I see new stuff every day.  I feel a part of all living things.  I'm probably more Buddhist than Christian when it comes to my spiritual theology [yet, I see a lot of that theology in what I've read of Jesus of Nazareth].  I never want to move... nor even go to the store sometimes, and, when away from home, I just want to come back.  It's my home, my lifestyle, my life around here.... and along with being married to a man who puts up with my pleasurable lifestyle, I feel most gratified.  My girlfriend would have been so proud of me with this interpretation.  Wish I could still share these strange things with her, but she died about 7 or 8 years ago.  Sometimes, though we rarely walked in any woods together, think about her when meditating on my paths.

I wonder if she knows that.

This is picture of the piece of bark ...if you look real carefully, you too can see the ID: