The Slope Was Never the Problem

Then

My place in the metro backs up to a steep, south-facing slope. It’s the kind of ground that never quite cooperates. Vetch takes hold. Leafy spurge spreads whether I like it or not. Thistle shows up when it can. Goldenrod holds on in pockets.

I used to spend a lot of time noticing what didn’t belong. What I couldn’t control. What I thought should be different.

It wasn’t wilderness. Not even close. There’s a deck. A feeder. A steady rotation of birds that don’t feel particularly remarkable. Nothing anyone would go out of their way to see.

Still, I found myself out there most mornings with a cup of coffee, phone within reach. I’d tell myself I was just easing into the day, appreciating what was there, but often I was scrolling. Waiting, in a way I probably wouldn’t have named then. For something to land. A message. A like. Some small signal that I was seen.

It’s a strange thing, how that kind of quiet can feel so loud. Sometimes deafening.

There are pieces of a different life scattered around me. A stack of birch near the edge of that deck. A rock I carried back from a shoreline I once knew well. I didn’t think much about what they meant. They were just there. Remnants of something that felt a little further away each year.

Most days, I wouldn’t have said anything was missing. But there was a slow drift happening. Not dramatic. Just enough to feel slightly out of step with myself.

I still have that place. I still stand on that deck.

Now

The trail rises to a ridge above the lake, the kind of place that feels like it’s been holding its ground for a long time and makes a little room for you when you get there. Pines and spruce and maple lean into the wind. Bedrock shows through underfoot. Lake Superior stretches out past the trees.

Some days she’s a dull gray under NW winds, other days flat enough to mirror the sky. On clear nights, she’ll hold the aurora and stars, too.

It’s easier to call a place like this wild. Easier to believe you’ve found something.

But what’s changed has less to do with the setting than I once thought. Still, it took this place to see it.

The signal drops out not far up the Gunflint. I used to notice that right away. Now I don’t think

about it much. There’s nothing to check. Nothing waiting on the other end.

Something in me settles here. It feels familiar in a way I don’t have to think about. When I was a kid, I used to slip off into the woods behind our place with a knapsack tied to a stick and a pocketknife. It just felt right.

You start to notice things without trying to capture them. The way the wind moves through the pines. The sound of your own steps finding a rhythm. How long you’ll stand in one place without feeling the need to move on.

Yesterday, I stopped along a swollen stretch of river, everything around it impossibly green from the rain and spray. The water pushed through with a kind of quiet force, and for a while I just stood there watching it. Then the clouds shifted enough for a break of sun to come through. Nothing dramatic. Just a crack in the clouds and a brush of light.

I caught myself offering a quiet prayer of gratitude on a riverbank, because what else to do with that kind of moment.

Sometimes I carry a small token in my pocket. Something carved by hand. No plan for it, really. At some point along the trail, I’ll leave it behind. No marker. No explanation. No way of knowing if anyone will ever come across it.

And then I leave Burnt Rock.

Back to the deck. Back to the slope. Same ground. Same birds. Same tangle of things growing where they will.

But it doesn’t feel quite the same anymore.

Between

For a long time, I thought what I was after was a different kind of place. Something bigger. Quieter. More removed.

And yes, some of that is absolutely true.

But the more honest shift hasn’t been where I am. It’s how I move between these places now.

A softening of the need to constantly check, to measure whether something landed, whether it was seen. Not because being seen doesn’t matter, it does. Maybe some of that goes back a ways. We all need our people. I’m lucky to have mine, even if they’re scattered now across time and distance. Some know who they are. Some do not.

Some have shown up with a kind of steady generosity I didn’t always know how to receive.

Others, in their own way, pushed me in the opposite direction. Toward a quieter independence, a reliance on my own footing.

Both shaped me. More than I probably understood at the time.

There’s a difference between sharing something and waiting on it. I’ve spent time in that space, filling the quiet with noise, with distraction, with things that looked like connection from a distance.

What I was missing wasn’t interaction. It was something closer to recognition in the truest sense. A feeling of being in the right place, doing something that felt like my own, whether anyone was watching or not.

Turns out, the slope was never the problem.

These days it feels simpler. Not in a nostalgic way. Not like things used to be better. Just clearer about what’s there when everything else falls away.

A walk. Some weather moving through. A quiet prayer on a riverbank. A few hours, or days where nothing is asked of you.

Time with people who know and love you. The ones who don’t need an explanation.

And sometimes, something small is left behind on a trail. Carried for a while, maybe longer than it needed to be, then set down where it feels right. Not for credit. Not for likes. Not to be found, necessarily. Just to exist for a while in a beautiful place that doesn’t need anything from it, or from you.

That’s been enough.

More than enough