Noticing the smallest differences

It is a quiet morning here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island. The equinox has come and gone and the mornings are darker and cooler. We have stopped changing the clocks in this part of the world, so the mornings will only ever grow darker by the clock until the solstice.  I'll be walking in pitch black in a month or so. 

My partner is the walking champion of our household, taking her morning and afternoon walks everyday as a non-optional part of her morning. She is the one that walks around in every weather.

Our walks are different. Hers takes her through the forest and meadows of the Terminal Creek valley and mine skirts the north side of Mannion Bay along David Road, crosses the point-with-no-name through the Miller's Landing neighbourhood and visits the tiny cove of Sunrise Beach at Miller's Landing.  

I always walk with a head full of music and thoughts, but my eyes and ears are wide open and in that way, walking is less the action and more the practice of noticing. Every morning I am rewarded with a moment of novelty. Today it was the rare sound of a Western Tanager calling from a Big-Leaf Maple. It was no doubt on its migration south, but it was making a call I had never heard before. Merlin very clearly confirmed it.  At the beach, I drained and stowed my kayak on the driftwood kayak rack made by one of our neighbours. It had somehow turned upward and caught a few centimetres of yesterday's rain in the cockpit. 

I sat in the cool outflow wind for a moment watching a single seal sleeping on a rock that had only recently emerged from the falling tide.  I took the photo that graces this post as the sun snuck a chance to pierce the gloaming. 

It's a holiday here Canada, so the usual business of school buses and commuters on the road was absent.  On my walk back up the hill to my home, about one kilometre and 75 meters of  climb, there were few cars, no dogs – none of my regular friends Elvis, Annie, Scout, Legend, or Lola were up yet – and only the sounds of kinglets, nuthatches and ravens in the canopy around me. 

Slow, sauntering, quiet, attentive.