Learning Patience

I heard the heron before I saw it. Two loud squawks broke the silence of the slough, announcing its approach before its shape ever cleared the treeline.

I was sitting low in my kayak when it came into view, rising up the dark water of a slough off the Tchefuncte River, just before dawn. The cypress-tupelo forest behind it held onto the night a little longer, dark and detailed enough to give the bird somewhere to stand out against. I panned with it as it came, and for a moment it seemed to hang there, suspended, as if floating on a string. It passed by effortlessly, unbothered by my presence, wings barely working against the still morning air.

There is something prehistoric about a great blue heron in flight. The long neck, the slow wingbeat, the sheer size of it. It is easy to imagine the shape as something older than it is, something that predates us.

I loved dinosaurs as a boy. And for a while, I really wanted to be a paleontologist. That never happened. But the pull toward the natural world never left.

Scouting is where that love first found its shape. Long before I had a camera in my hands, I had a pack on my back, learning to read a trail, sit still, and pay attention to what was around me. It gave me a language for the outdoors before I knew I would spend a lifetime speaking it.

My parents were part of that too. They never pushed me toward the path that looked most sensible on paper. They reminded me, in ways big and small, that there was value in exploring beyond what I thought was the "right" way forward. That permission, to wander, to follow curiosity instead of a straight line, shaped the course of my life more than I probably realized at the time.

Nature pulls at me stronger than gravity. It always has. But it also asks something of you in return. Sometimes I've been out for hours with nothing appearing, and I ask myself what I am supposed to see. Sometimes it's a dragonfly. Sometimes a flower, a landscape, an animal. It requires a great deal of patience.

Ironically, I was not a patient kid. One summer my grandparents came to visit, and PopPop tried to teach me patience as a ten-year-old boy. I don't remember exactly what caused it, but I found myself writing the word "patience" one hundred times that day. I doubt he knew it then, but the lesson stuck. It just took the outdoors to finally teach me how to use it.

Then a moment like this arrives, and you know. You were meant to be there. Meant to witness it. The air, the water, the mist, the birds, the trees, the sounds. All of it given, and all of it yours to receive, if you are willing to wait for it.