Be Where Your Feet Are

Yesterday, I led a small group of hikers on a walk through the forest. 

I chose this particular woodland for an early spring hike because it’s here that thousands of wildflowers poke through a matted layer of last fall’s cast-off leaves to carpet the forest floor in delicate color. 

In the short weeks before leaf-out as snowy cold gives way to verdant humidity, the sun is brighter and hotter offering a brief window for plants to emerge, bloom, and fruit. Trillium, spring beauty, sharp-lobed hepatica, trout lily, cutleaf toothwort are just a few of the flowers we saw putting on their Sunday best. 

They’ll all live out an entire reproductive cycle before quickly dying back, their bulbs and rhizomes waiting in the dark underground to appear again next spring. This phenomenon of a short life above ground gives these woodland flowers their name – “ephemerals.” 

The word ephemeral comes from the Greek for “lasting only one day.” Fleeting, transitory, impermanent, there’s a special power in things that are short-lived. 

Like listening to a musical concert, walking through ephemerals is experiential. No matter the number of photos we snapped or superlatives that spilled from our mouths gaping in wonder and awe, it was impossible to hold these fragile living things within our grasp for very long.

Read/Listen to “The Sound of Spring”

We have a saying in the hiker world, “Be where your feet are.” It’s all about staying present in the moment and not dwelling too much on the past or worrying about the future. To “be where your feet are” quite literally encourages us to stay grounded. 

While our feet were on the move from one clump of flowers nodding in the breeze to the next, it occurred to me that these temporary lovelies act as reminders that all of life is in a constant state of flux.

It wasn’t as if we were doing anything productive besides walking and admiring, but in giving these flowers – seemingly placed here for no other reason but to delight us – our fullest attention, life’s plans and problems seemed very far away. They lost their luster and were less important than simply being here in the forest. 

Like ephemerals, we too are short-lived. The varied collection of moments like this that add up to a life will never be repeated in exactly the same way. Change and transitions are inevitable not only for these flowers but for us. 

That fact didn’t make me sad or afraid. As I studied one tough trillium stalk spearing a crumpled oak leaf, I realized I can also be a tough stalk pushing through hard times and reaching for the light or a showy flower in the groove of things, a cycle that will repeat over and over until I too will retreat into the dark underground.

But for now, it was an ephemeral moment with ephemeral woodland flowers in the most ephemeral time of the year, a mere week or two in early spring. How grateful I was to share it with friends. 

When you feel anxious, overwhelmed, stressed about the future or regretting the past, look down at your feet and be where they are, right here with you in this wondrous moment.