Читать книгу The Ashokan Way - Gail Straub - Страница 9

Attention is a form of devotion and a pathway to intimacy. Each day I walk an hour-long loop along the Ashokan Reservoir surrounded by the grandeur of the Catskill Mountain Watershed. Between High Point in the west and Overlook in the east, eighteen peaks encircle the vast reservoir-like ancient bluestone guardians. Bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, great blue herons, leaping trout, and herds of deer are among my regular companions. Occasionally I have human companions too, but the vast majority of my walks are taken alone and used as a time for contemplation and quiet renewal. I‘ve long been enamored that Ashokan translates as the place of many fishes in the Algonkian language, and over the years I have discovered that on every conceivable level this is, indeed, an abundant place. And so I have come to call this daily walk the Ashokan Way, not only because it is a literal walkway, but also because this practice has shaped my way of life.

Though this book tracks one particular year of my rounds, my walkabout has been informed by thirty-six years of strolling through this landscape as well as living in it. For these last decades, I have either been exploring it, observing it from my home, or sleeping and dreaming in a bed that faces directly out onto the Ashokan and her eighteen mountain guardians. I would not be who I am without this body of water and this mountain range. My interior landscape is now so intertwined with this outer landscape that it is impossible to know where one begins and the other ends. Certainly along with my relationships with my husband David, my family, and my close community of friends, I count my relationship with this place as one of my most cherished. It has shaped me and perhaps, because I have loved it, I have also affected it.

On any given day, walking the Ashokan Way can lead me in any number of directions. Sometimes I am hurled back in time, and the ghosts and voices that haunt this place walk beside me, telling me their stories. Other days the outer landscape takes me deep inside my own territory, trekking the hills and valleys of my aspirations and sorrows, my joys and confusions. On many occasions, this open space offers a profound antidote to my interior terrain that has become overcrowded with distraction and workaholism. And on still other strolls, the land seems to cast me out toward the furthest horizon to a place where I can see through the material into the mystical.

My devotion to the Ashokan Way has opened gateways to mysterious worlds along with portals into self-understanding and restoration. And yet the more intimate I am with these mountains and this water, these forests and creatures, the more I recognize that I will never fully know them. I will never come close to receiving all the benedictions that this landscape has to bestow. Long after I am gone, the Ashokan and the Catskills will still be here. But before my time comes, I want to have written down what they have meant to me. And I hope that in doing this my readers, too, can benefit from the gifts of this place. In giving thanks, I begin and end this tribute on Thanksgiving Day.