Somewhere between Snowshoe Mountain and Cass Railroad in the West Virginia mountains is a two lane paved road you’ll miss unless you know what you’re looking for. “Back Mountain Road” winds for miles along the side of the ridge, looking down on red barns and gold hayricks.
I drove it one August day looking for pictures to paint. Nobody seemed to believe that a 25 year old man would take 2 weeks to be alone in the country with a watercolor palette, but I was in heaven.
I sat for a day, a beginning painter, trying to mix the color of shadows on the abandoned white church. When I look at those paintings now I barely see any color at all. I was so timid, needing a teacher who would slap my hand and make me sin boldly.
I found a split-rail fence which seemed to belong to no-one, and it was overgrown with orange day-lilies. Cameras used film then, and it was expensive, and I felt extravagant spending a dozen snaps of Kodachrome on the flowers. I was in my 20’s and innocently trying to be an artist. Like everyone young, I didn’t realize how I had so much life ahead of me. Like every starting artist, I didn’t see what pictures were in front of me, beneath my feet, on every fence, inside every bloom. If I knew then what I know now, I’d have wasted all the film on one stamen.
I got so discouraged with painting I left Back Mountain Road to drive down a gravel trail, and I stalked a heron back into the wilderness, as if it were an angel transporting me from the pain of maps. I wanted only to stand beside it, on one leg, motionless, unblinking, and see the dart of the minnow the way the bird saw it. It watched me sidelong, but never let me get close, one eye twinkling after minnows, the other eye amused by my vision quest.
I’d drive a hundred feet closer to the heron, while the heron didn’t move. But just as I felt close enough to leave the car and walk down the slight bank into the creek, the bird would jump to wing and follow the creekbed away from me, then stop just before floating out of sight, settle back down onto one foot, and take up vigil again. One eye down, one eye to me. Waiting for me to drive another hundred feet and repeat my steps. Me, creeping along and unsettled, thinking of how to be different. Him, perfectly still.
Decades older now, I’m finally seeing how “perfectly still” and staring is the way of the artist. The shaman takes trickster forms.
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
 Mary Oliver