Early this month I just had the urge to explore, so I thought lets see whats down this road and found the birth place of George Washing Carver. A man I dimly remember for high school history classes and various peanut references over the years, so I just had to stop and find out what the story was and quite a story was told. Now if you look up the story some where like wikipedia you'll get a clearer picture of the bare facts but standing in the little square patch of ground where the cabin he was born in I started to get an emotional sense of the man, small and sickly born a slave, yet his world was not what I would have imagined. think to start life with just a first name, over time he falls in love with the natural world, learning and art. Here walking in the world of his early youth I could see how it happened, and given my own love of nature I could feel a kindred spirit. It was here that his spirituality also took root (I may not share his brand of belief I do share his sense wonder) given the time the late 1860's and early 1870's his options were limited in ways to express them one was plants (they called him the plant doctor as a boy) and art. His last name was given to him by the family that took him in after his mother and he were kidnapped and only he was found. At or around 12 his thirst for knowledge was so great he left the Carver's for a small near by town and started his life's adventure, he wanted to learn for learnings sake, and again I too knew that impulse.

Now the area is in many ways much as he would have remember it, I could look at his world from treeline to treeline and across fallow fields, getting a sense of time and place clearly. There was a peace there that I needed and a lesson. At the end of the walking trail was his a small bust of his likeness which played a small speech he made just before he died, it was called "Basic Equipment" if I remember right Its content was that all of us are given the same basic tools, eyes to see, hands to shape the world, legs to explore that world, and a mind to create meaning in that world. It's how we use those tools that make us who we are and shape the world around us.

For a Sunday drive I got a wonderful gift. Its strange a few days later I found myself at a small patch of land that belonged to the Civil War, a battle of local importance and thought of those basic tools, heres a place of great sorrow and violence and a few miles down the road was the place where a man grew up who suffer the effects of this conflict and its after affects yet carried no bitterness about it and found the strength to follow his dreams.

I guess I have been feeling a bit small now about my own troubles, and as fall turns to winter here I will return to George's places and see if I can't a bigger spirit within myself.