Muddy Boots, Beautiful Surprises
Autumn arrived with a new school year for both of us – my son starting his, and me starting mine, the second year of herbalism school. It began, fittingly, with a forest trip: roots, mushrooms, a day of learning tucked deep among the trees.
In my head, before it began, I'd already lived the whole thing. Soft footsteps on forest floor. Beautiful photographs. Savouring each new mushroom I discovered, learning quietly alongside a handful of lovely women, all of us moving gently through dappled light. Serene. Almost magical.
Four of us drove out together that morning, full of laughter, rain-jackets and boots piled in the boot, properly prepared and properly eager. And then the trip began – and it was nothing like the picture in my head.
We pushed through mud, climbed over fallen trees, crossed a small river trying not to slip in, kilometre after kilometre. Somewhere along the way, I lost the thread of anything serene at all. It became a matter of the next step, the next root to climb over, hunger, tiredness. I took a few photographs in the rush, but every bit of mushroom knowledge I'd hoped to gather simply slipped out of my head. It felt far less like a peaceful herbal walk, and far more like an expedition to survive.
And yet – the drive home. Muddy, exhausted, half-collapsed into our seats, we laughed harder than we would have after any smooth, easy day. We shared stories, and felt closer to one another for having gone through something difficult together. The view out the window – sunlight dropping low, autumn colour behind the glass. I appreciated it more than I would have on an easy day.
That day taught me something about myself. I like my life slower. I like moving through my days gently enough to actually notice the beauty along the way, to breathe inside it rather than rush past it. Without that hard, muddy contrast, I don't think I'd have felt that preference so clearly.
But I've also come to love this – that life so rarely goes as planned. Sometimes we get what we actually need, not what we asked for. The unplanned moments are the ones that stay with us longest, that carve themselves in deeper than anything we could have arranged. Driving home that evening, tired and laughing, sun dropping through the trees, I felt it clearly: people are beautiful. Life is beautiful.
It's exactly this kind of noticing – small, unexpected beauty, found in places you didn't plan for it – that Beauty Walk was built to hold. Not the beauty you go looking for, necessarily, but the kind that finds you halfway through the mud, and turns out to be the part worth remembering most.
