the nights of deliberate living

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately..."
(H.D. Thoreau)

Every night, around midnight, I took my big black Labrador and walked down the well-lit suburban street and turned into an unlit gravel road that led through a patch of woods. It wasn't a long road - you walked past a few stray houses on one side and a couple of minutes later you reached a little grocery shop sitting right next to a busy highway, and the road ended there.

On the side of the road that had no houses there were only trees. A tiny  patch of woods,  and I loved to hide in there. Even though you could see the road on one side, an abandoned saw-mill on the other and a house on the third, when you stood among the tall pine trees you felt secluded and sheltered. I remembered playing there with my best friend as a kid, mostly pretending to be Indians or wild animals in a vast forest wilderness, climbing on fallen tree trunks and large rocks. Even as a grown-up, I could still feel the magic and fantasy shimmering in the air, making me shiver with delight.

My midnight walks were pitch-black and icy in the winter, and I used to lean against a certain old pine tree - my dream tree, because even in the dead of winter there was the warmth of life in its bark and I felt stronger just for touching it. I could see the stars, which in my Star Trek-fueled dreams symbolized the ultimate adventure. If I was lucky, there were even the Northern Lights. And I could watch the highway from a distance - nearly empty at this hour, but every now and then a lorry broke the stillness, thundering past on its way to marvellous cities and countries I would someday get to see.


In the white nights of summer, I would kick off my shoes and climb barefoot onto a big rock, still warm from the sun. The sky was bright but the dreams were no less present.

These were my teenage night walks, where I planned my future adventures and believed absolutely everything.

( Picture from scenicreflections .com )