The Maps We Keep

Summer - Week 30 - On Sacred Routes and the Road Home

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures — and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

There are roads that exist only in the secret geography of attention, pathways carved not by traffic but by the particular way we have learned to love a place. Mine runs past the old red barn that leans into the wind like an elder telling stories, and curves around the small lake where each year I catalogue a year's worth of avian visitors. The great blue heron in spring's early mornings, the family of mallards teaching their young the art of feeding, the pelicans that arrive with summer's heat and glide across the surface with prehistoric grace. By winter, this same lake will host hundreds of geese, their voices creating a symphony of migration that can be heard for miles, transforming my quiet daily route into something that feels like the crossroads of continents.

This morning, driving toward the horses, I notice the corn has climbed to nearly five feet, tall enough now to whisper secrets to the wind. I have watched this field transform from bare earth to the tender green shoots of late spring to this towering army of emerald soldiers marching toward harvest. Each journey along this road has been a page in a story only I am writing, a map drawn through the act of choosing to see.

The lake water tells me today's weather before I feel it - the surface ruffled into small waves that speak of afternoon winds building, the kind that will set the cottonwoods to their ancient conversation with the sky. By evening, this same lake will hold the sunset like a cupped palm, and I will know, without looking at any forecast, what kind of night is coming.

These are the territories we claim not through ownership but through intimacy, the landscapes that become part of our internal architecture. The route I chose walking home from school because of the magnolia tree that bloomed like a small revolution each spring along the quiet street where it stood, teaching me that beauty could be both predictable and miraculous. The golden retriever I used to pass on my way to that first London apartment. I would take the longer route through the fancy houses with their careful gardens because those few moments of connection with another living thing made the journey to my north London complex feel less like exile and more like choice. And, the corner where I first understood that loneliness and solitude were different countries entirely, both worth visiting but not worth staying in forever.

These internal maps remind me that meaning comes not from the places themselves but from how we remember them.

Such private landmarks accumulate over a lifetime, creating a geography known only to us. But sometimes, if we're fortunate, someone we love opens their map and invites us in, and this becomes the most profound gift of intimacy.

My husband brought me to his creek last week, the place where he has spent years reading the rock face like a familiar book, learning which holds could be trusted and which were mere suggestions. But that day, he led me to the water itself, to the place where mountain snowmelt pools in quiet eddies before continuing its journey toward something vast.

He brought me into his sanctuary, and now that bend in Boulder Creek holds both our stories - his years of conversation with the rock, my own quiet recognition of what keeps drawing him back. This is how love expands geography. We inherit each other's sacred places, learn to see through borrowed eyes until the seeing becomes our own.

Standing by that creek, I understood something about the invisible maps we all navigate, how we're each following our own private routes through the world, but sometimes those paths converge in ways that expand what home can mean. Back in my own landscape, this insight settles into my daily rhythms. Later that week, on my morning drive to the horses, I hear the honking announcement that time is turning again.

The geese have begun returning early this year, their internal compasses reading changes I cannot yet feel. They carry their own maps across continents, following magnetic lines and ancestral memory, stopping at the same wetlands their great-grandparents knew well. Their arrival alerts me to fall's approach like a letter delivered from the future, telling me that the corn I've watched grow will soon be golden, that the lake's surface will soon reflect different kinds of light.

We all navigate by invisible cartography, the geese by magnetism and inherited knowing, we by the accumulated weight of moments that have mattered. The road I drive to reach the horses is just asphalt and paint to anyone else, but for me it has become a prayer path, a daily pilgrimage through a landscape I've chosen to know intimately. Each journey deposits another layer of meaning, until what began as routine becomes something closer to devotion.

There is something both heartbreaking and beautiful about these private geographies we create. They exist fully only within us, these detailed maps of affection drawn through the simple act of choosing to notice. The way late afternoon light hits the weathered boards of the leaning barn. The exact spot on the lake's edge where the heron likes to stand in contemplation. The feeling of the dirt road beneath my tires as it transitions from gravel to dust, marking the final approach to the horses.

When we die, these maps die with us - all the small intimacies, the landmarks, the personal meanings we've attached to ordinary places. No GPS can record the route that takes you past the house where you first learned heartbreak, or guide you to the tree where you once sat and understood something important about forgiveness. These are the territories we explore alone, even when we travel them with others.

But perhaps that's what makes them precious, their very ephemeral nature, the way they exist only in the intersection between place and perception, landscape and love. It reminds me that we are all navigators, all cartographers of the heart, all finding our way through.

Tomorrow I will drive the familiar road, watching for subtle changes in the light, in the lake's mood, in the corn's slow march toward harvest. Another thin layer added to the map I am always making, the one that charts not just where I have been but how each place has changed me in return.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let's experience nature's gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane