The Field

One of my friends said one time, "I love how when you refer to 'the field' you actually mean a field."  This is what it looks like, or can look like, in Wilderness Therapy.  This is after a torrential downpour came through.  The red dirt floor of the shelter, where we were running therapy sessions, turned into a swamp.  Red muddy lanes of ditches filled the long road.  Our dog's tail soaked up the mud and...  you can imagine what came next.

And can the desert ever look as fresh as it does after a rain storm?

I came across this passage, in a book by John Updike, that I love, S.  The forward contains a passage from Nathanial Hawthorne's The Scarlett Letter, which describes the main character, Hester Prynne.  It's the intro, which I think relates to the way the girls out here come out of the wilderness:

"She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication.  And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison.  Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped." (p. 1)

In some sense, that's what the girls look like when they leave,"characterized by a certain state and dignity" after, perhaps, being caught up in some sort of "disastrous storm".  Scarlett letters get burned in the fire.  That's what I love about the wilderness.  

Welcome to the field.