I closed my eyes

Many years back, I was living in a cabin a few miles from a small coastal town.  When there were low tides in the early mornings I would walk to town along the shoreline.  There was a large expanse of tidal flats where I could walk way, way out beyond the high tide mark, cross a river and continue onwards.

On one of these walks one morning, I decided to close my eyes and count one hundred steps.  There was only the flat expanse of exposed shoreline there ahead of me, and that river crossing somewhere up ahead.  I figured that the river crossing was much farther away than one hundred steps, and I began walking.

The experience was one of amazement, wonder and even a small tinge of what I might admit to as terror.  I refused to open my eyes until I had walked that one hundred steps.  During those steps, I imagined so many things, felt so many things, heard so many things, smelled so many things.  I felt what I now describe as a renewed texture of each moment, each step.

Over these many years, I have taken many types of one hundred step walks.  Out in my kayak, I have closed my eyes and paddled for one hundred seconds.  In the Arizona desert, I plugged my ears and watched an early morning rainstorm in perfect silence as I counted one hundred raindrops fall upon my face.  I have run around in a snowstorm like a crazed, giddy child catching one hundred snowflakes on my tongue.  I chewed a small almond one hundred times. I gauged one hundred sips of a cup of tea. And once, I read one beautiful sentence one hundred times aloud.

Last week I put a new door handle on my sauna.  It is made from a piece of wood from a branch of a tree that I spent weeks roaming the forest looking for.  There had been an old metal handle on the door, that had been attached with two bolts.  I needed to find a piece of wood that perfectly matched the holes of those two bolts.  I finally, I think, found it.

As I was taking the bark off the bend of wood and starting to whittle it down, I thought of all of those many one hundred step times in my past.  What emerged was a thought that I would identify the one small area where my fingers would linger the most on that handle while opening the door or closing the door, and I would try to merge a smoothness on the backside of the handle - the invisible side facing the door - with a roughness on the front side, so that every time I opened or closed the door, I could rest my fingers on that spot, actually, as it turns out, rest one finger - as it tuns out, the middle finger on my right hand - there in that space of transition, and allow it to feel that moment, that sense of flow, that question, that answer, that music, that whisper, that taste of the most wondrous slightness of hint of sapphron in a cup of tea, that smell of sea amidst endlessness...

I'm sure I have already done it a hundred times, but am not counting this time.