When I made my way from our yard to the shores of a lake that looked enormous and forever, my 5-year-old imagination was flying across a world of possibilities. There were no grownup words, but my senses named this, ‘everything’ and ‘anything’.

I’m not sure how long I’d been there when I heard my mother whisper my name. Not wanting to startle the dog standing on my shoulders, a dog neither of us had met before, she stepped slowly to my side. The memory is clear. A yester-day tucked within decades of time.

As I stood with my new friend in a kind of wordless union inside a large surround of sky and water, delight turned into concern when I saw the look on my mother’s face -

“It’s okay, Mommy,” I said, “I like dogs better than people.”

Remembering those first years of life as warm and loving , I have no way to explain such thinking, other than to say it was there and it was true.

I’m drawn naturally to the quiet, fair-minded innocence I sense in every animal. And, no matter the number of visits to the same woodland, the beauty and magic of scents, textures, and colours are always new, and new again.

These days, even in the presence of the ‘new’, thoughts and visions reverse and the wish to revisit beginnings persists. Awareness, seemingly undiminished and more appreciated than ever before, encourages an opening to memories of the long ago, when breath was taken by the damp fragrance of moss, or the leathery feel and smell of a worn horse’s saddle.

As the older me grows more available to noticing, a curiosity about the intensity and beauty of surprise and freedom experienced years before has returned. Past connects and is, present. It lingers, secure and well-stored in scent and feel - nostrils filled with the spoor of earth or the ‘taste’ of fish and salt-air when the younger me would sit listening for a ferry’s horn at an old dock, or run with hundreds of scattering horseshoe crabs across the sands of a Long Island beach.

Combining four decades of psychology practice with this love I hold for nature, a new journey begins. I’ll continue working with the intelligent, thoughtful, life-loving souls I’m privileged to coach on both sides of the sea, helping them recognize the fabulous best I see in each and every one.

But, I’ll focus too on words and ideas related to the science and spirit of gentle healing, and the wisdom found in life’s second half - one photo, one insight, and every yet-to-be-discovered, brand new adventure at a time.

With nature as backdrop and walking as transport, the eye and heart awaken and the idea, the dream, the creation arrive - unexpected, in a rush and unbidden teasing and testing and stretching of the mind, playful and without restriction. Where nature is, there is no critic, no doubt, no uncertainty, no limiting reminder of age.

The everything and anything - still here after all these years.

Thank you for ‘listening’…

Austen Hayes, phd

austenhayes@gmail.com