Suzanne Askham

This is how everyday adventures are made

My meditation groups are expecting a theme to focus on next month and, unusually, I don’t have one. So I lace up my walking boots and head outdoors for inspiration. The path into the woods is almost hidden by tall bracken. It looks like a keyhole to adventure…

A gnarled tree decorated with long-limbed ivy dryads looms like a guardian just inside the entrance to the woods. The air feels still, waiting. And, just like that, my 21st-century preoccupations slide away to be replaced by the timeless now.

I step along knotted narrow paths fringed by bedraggled wild garlic, then through more bracken that dwarfs me. There are no signs of human habitation here. It feels really wild. The sense of adventure is growing stronger and yet I’m still not that far from my own kitchen door. Maybe, it’s an everyday sort of adventure.

After a while, the path opens out and becomes an idyllic, meandering thing.

‘If this is an adventure,’ I think, ‘there should be treasure of some sort.’ And so I look for treasure along the path – a tiny form of proof that this word ‘adventure’ is the one I’ve been searching for. And sure enough, before long, the way becomes dotted with wild orchids, like purple gems lining my route.

I look more closely at one of the stems. They seem wonderfully exotic for temperate England. Each tiny, vibrant bloom is worth a meditation in itself.

It feels like a sign, as though I needed one, that ‘Adventure’ is the ideal theme for my groups to meditate on during July.