In the thicket

dense and moving slowly

There’s a thicket at the edge of the campground.

The land there is overgrown with tiny spruce trees.

They are about an inch in diameter and grow less than six inches apart.

This density goes on for a couple hundred feet.

When I go walking to visit my uncle, the path to get to his cabin takes me a half mile out of my way around the thicket.

Recently, I’ve been working to cut a trail through to make the route shorter, not only for me, but the rest of my family.

Cutting a thicket is slow and tedious work. Sure, things could go more quickly if I used a bulldozer. Then I’d have a road, not the cute, little path of my dreams.

Even using power tools designed for clearing a thicket, the work moves slowly.

When we set out to clear a trail, make change, write a book or raise a family, we frequently encounter thickets. These are the places in our process where our movements are limited. Things get dense. We come up against things that are solid, abundant and deep.

In the forest what to do next is easy:…