There’s something about walking in the forest that’s hard to see from here. From here it’s a waste of time. Walking in the forest doesn’t seem to fit inside the constraints of what must be done. From inside, it’s hard to imagine why outside matters because, from inside, it doesn’t. Therein lies the odd trap that, if we let it, keeps us locked up in these dumb boxes, these thoughts about ourselves—a feast of cheese with a broken neck. So, because of the weird inability to imagine from inside, perhaps it would be wise for us to merely harbor the intuition that there is indeed something about walking in the forest—there’s something out there! And, against all the yammering about what must be done, we might reserve some time during which we ignore our inability to imagine, resist our doubts, fling the door open, and go outside. 

The flinging part is important. Fling it open! Something’s going to happen. 

But what will happen? From here we don’t know and, by forcing ourselves to acknowledge our ignorance, by wasting our time and flinging the door open, we have traversed the longest and profoundest part of the whole journey. The rest is just walking. 

Most often, I am strangely deflated about how nothing is happening. Margaret’s up ahead and I lag behind, thinking dumb thoughts. Eventually, I become vaguely invigorated, but not enlightened, which is stupid and I wonder how I will pay my credit card bill this month. I look at Margaret’s butt and try to drum up some lofty sentiments. What a wonderful woman to meet as the sun begins to set. The evening of my life, I think, is vividly purple. Here I—ouch, a rock—trip and stumble. Walking in the forest will eventually pull your head from the clouds and put your mind in your feet, step by step. Again, this vague invigoration. What is it? Isn’t it precisely this that from inside can’t be imagined? From where then am I now all this? It’s not a shot of whiskey or a sugar buzz, nothing so gaudy, but rather a calm and gentle wellness that’s entirely resistant to recollection inside tranquil walls. What’s that bit about heaven and earth that Hamlet says to Horatio, I wonder, but this reverie is shattered by the world collapsing into a single point.

“Margaret!” I hiss, wrap my arm around her, and point at the single point. “Holy shit,” Margaret replies and then nothing—nothing but the biggest blue jay in the history of the world. I mean this blue jay is like twice the size of any blue jay you’ve ever seen. It jams all your systems of logic and defies classification. The words “blue jay” drop away and now it’s just a previously undiscovered giant blue bird, but your awe, too, releases that description and, I don’t know—it’s blue! You are the first person to ever have eyes to see this irridescent blue until it flies away and we are just these quiet animals. Something happened.

And it’s not that, or anything like that, that is the something of the something about walking in the forest. Nothing has to happen, and it often does, but there’s something about the alert and awakened sense that something’s going to happen that is the actual substance of the something about walking in the forest. This is the key to the mystery of how the door flings open. 

We would later find out from a book that we didn’t see a blue jay and also that we didn’t discover a new species of giant blue bird. It was actually a Steller’s Jay, a large blue bird found in the western portion of North America at elevations of 3,000-10,000 feet. This is the description from inside, but it’s hard to see from here.