Planting Seeds

August, 21 - I remember when I was young, while my family lived in Brampton, a city not far from Toronto, going on Sunday drives with my parents. I hated these drives because I had a tendency to get car sick. We would drive for not much more than an hour, but to me at the time it seemed like each minute dragged on, especially in my dread of the coming car sickness. Despite all this though there was a definite joy in these Sunday drives. We would more often than not wind up at the head of some forest trail. With my parents, I would walk along those trails in absolute bliss. Everything seemed so big, so vast, and powerful, but it was all quiet and calm; danger was non-existent. If a log crossed the trail, I would take my father’s right hand, my mother’s left hand and they would lift me and swing me over the fallen tree. Birds chirped in the thousands, and I would try to mimic their calls – though at that age I couldn’t whistle in the very least. At times we would see deer, through the trees and off in the distance. We would watch them silently.

In retrospect, in looking at how my life and personality have developed, these were the earliest events that planted the seeds that have grown into my utter reverence for Nature. These Sunday drives took me on adventures – big ones for a six year old – that helped in the ultimate molding of who I am. While my friends went to church on Sunday mornings, I went to the forest – a church of an entirely different dogma.

A few years later, after we moved to Newfoundland, I had the special opportunity to go to the forest any time I wished. The trailhead was no longer an hour’s drive away, it was a minute’s walk. From this time, the first little shoots from the seeds were beginning to appear. Nature consumed me completely, especially hills and higher regions of land.

It was around this time that I also began dabbling in literature, writings of my own. One day in the autumn of my thirteenth year, I was off on a hike alone in the hills behind our house. Everything that day must have been in perfect harmony, because it was the day that, for some reason, I wrote my first piece of poetry. That poem was the first time that I translated what I saw around me into words on paper.

As the forenoon sun strikes the silver dew

A slant of light brings things anew,

And the life-source moves in its flowing way

Beneath the hazy hills on a mid-Autumn day.

A graceful wind awakens the trees,

So gently they dance in their woodland ease;

My first day in the wild, calm and slow…

Enlightened by the river’s flow.

And not far overhead the migrator sings

Of companionship as only solitude brings.

O! so distant the world in this rugged hall,

Just me, the forest, and the waterfall.

  The dusk has fallen upon the hill,

  The starlight approaches and I am here still.

The words I wrote in 'The River Flows' still hold true to me today, maybe even more so than when I first wrote them.

Every time I return home now to Newfoundland to visit my mother and father, I make certain we all take a Sunday drive together. Luckily for me, I don’t get car sick anymore.

© Shawn James Morrissey. All rights reserved. 2007-2008

All materials copyrighted unless otherwise noted, 2005-2008