Old Florida Part 2: Our 'Secret Garden'

Looking at these photos, I wish I could absorb them into my soul, so that the ache will go away. I know you've had that experience where you just want to soak the view in as much as possible. And you stand there and you look and you look and you look and it's still not enough. All I have is these photographs of a time when I was there for maybe an hour or so peering, willing something of it to always stay with me, to not leave me, to not just be images I once encountered through a camera lens. 

There's a wonderful passage from "The Secret Garden" that I think is fitting:

"One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun--which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in some one's eyes."

I do believe that in these moments, so sweetly described by Frances Hodgson Burnett, that we are indeed connected to this earth and to each other and that the earth in these wordless displays of beauty shows us how...how to be.

I want to give credit to my guide for the evening, Mr. Earl Debary (DEE-bary), who is one of those people you can't quite believe is standing next to you. I firmly believe he knows everything there is to know about our grand forest, the Big Scrub. He's seen what I will never see, a little like William Bartram all those long years ago traipsing through Florida with eyes of wonder and gratitude. He sounds like people in the woods should sound, saying things like 'the creek's over yonder'. I marvel that this man is my friend. I wish I had only found him sooner. 

Photos from an August night hike out to Lake Eaton in the Ocala National Forest.