My Heart Leaps Up

Dear Deer

5" x 7"

Watercolor

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

---William Wordsworth

Life brings those moments where Wordsworth's poem expresses our own responses to experiences that make our hearts leap up and take our breath away.  Last Sunday I was walking through a wooded section around a lake here in Omaha with my brother Robert. We were enjoying conversation while strolling along the bike/walking path.  Suddenly I looked up and my heart leapt up while I froze!  Right beside the path grazing on some tree leaves within reach was a beautiful doe.  She was calm and eyed us cautiously, but her curiosity caused her to move closer in my direction.  For several minutes we enjoyed watching her graceful movements and sleek beauty.

Yellowstone River Deer

9" x 12"

Pastel

If you are not moved by the grand moments in nature, whether large or small, something is dead inside of you. We should rather die than loose the sensitivity to the wonder in creation that William Wordsworth spoke of in his poem.  The other day I came around the corner of the house and spied a special moment for a squirrel in the large oak tree.  Here is what I captured from that moment:

Out on a Limb

Watercolor

And here's a little watercolor sketch I captured of an American Goldfinch at my birdbath outside my studio door:

Birdbath Bather

Watercolor

Another moment when I felt my heart leaping, er....rather pounding, was when I climbed 14, 259 ft. Long's Peak in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.  It wasn't that I was out of shape, but that the sheer view downward in places was raising my pulse! 

 A very brave lady named Isabella Bird experienced the same reaction over 100 years before I made my climb.  She wrote in her wonderful book A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains describing her feelings going up Long's Peak:  

Slipping, faltering, gasping from the exhausting toil in the rarefied air, with throbbing hearts and panting lungs, we reached the top of the gorge and squeezed ourselves between two gigantic fragments of rock by a passage called the "Dog's Lift", when I climbed on the shoulders of one man and then was hauled up.  This introduced us ...to a narrow shelf of considerable length, rugged, uneven, and so overhung by the cliff in some places that it is necessary to crouch to pass at all.....But there, and on the final, and to my thinking, the worst part of the climb, one slip, and a breathing, thinking, human being would lie 3,000 feet below, a shapeless, bloody heap!

Did that get your heart rate going faster?  Stay with me....we're almost to the top!

Scaling, not climbing, is the correct term for this last ascent.  It took one hour to accomplish 500 feet, pausing for breath every minute or two.  The only foothold was in narrow cracks or on minute projections on the granite.  To get a toe in these cracks, or here or there on a scarcely obvious projection, while crawling on hands and knees, all the while tortured with thirst and gasping and struggling for breath, this was the climb;  but at last the Peak was won. 

Isabella Bird was a brave, adventurous lady who wrote about many other exploits in the wilderness in her book.  Believe it or not, she did it all without a cell phone or GPS to guide her!  May her tribe increase.  Get outdoors and let your heart do some leaping this week!

Be brave and courageous!