So there’s an arroyo near my place of work. It’s a beautiful arroyo, and on walks I’ve often looked upon it and thought about exploring it. Just see where it takes me.
Last week, I started taking exploratory walks into the area immediately around the arroyo. There’s a nice walking path alongside it, but there’s no fun in staying on the path. The path doesn’t have interesting rocks blanketed in bright green lichen, nor does it have little treasures I can pick up along the way.
Case in point: I found a really cool rock absolutely covered in mica. Bling bling. It’s living on my desk at work.
And I was talking up this arroyo to the Very Lord Blake, and he and I decided to go on walkabout in the arroyo. Make it a date in nature!
I’ve taken to calling it “goblining”. See, it’s not quite a hike, rather, it’s a bit like a Tolkien-style walk. Lots of stopping to crouch down and look at cacti up close. Lots of “oh, what a neat rock” and stopping to pick it up, dust it off, and tuck it away as a treasure. That’s what makes it goblining. Tolkien took a four hour walk and stopped often to drink in the beauty of our natural world. My walks include treasure hunting. And seeing that both the Very Lord Blake and I want to get healthy again and incorporate more activity into our lives, what’s better than goblining?
Santa Fe is perfect for it.
Santa Fe has some incredible rocks.
See, I believe in another world I may have become a geologist. I have always loved rocks. As a little girl in Haysville, Kansas, I used to walk around with a glass Hellmann’s jar, which housed all the interesting rocks I would find.
Mom would sometimes pick through it to throw out the bits of glass or junk I had decided were “rocks”, but for the most part it contained little bits of quartz, rocks with mica, rocks with interesting striation, you know, stuff that a budding geologist would find interesting.
Later, in the fourth grade, I had a crush on a boy in my class and he must have liked me back because he gave me a small velvet bag filled with tumbled rocks that he had picked up at a rock show. I treasured that little velvet bag, and Lord only knows what happened to it. I ended up misplacing it over the decades and it still devastates me.
In college, I took geology for the fun of it. And it was a fun class. The professor was a doll; she was full of hilarious rock puns and jokes and she clearly had a passion for her field of study. I really should have changed my major then and there, but I had already been in college for five years at that point and I just wanted to hurry up and graduate. I changed majors three times. I was just too burned out to do a fourth.
So I really enjoy taking a long, meandering walk to collect rocks, dubbing them treasure. And maybe someday I can buy a cute little leather drawstring pouch to put those cool rocks into on my walks. A glass Hellmann’s jar is just too awkward to carry around.
Leave a Reply