Last week I gave a very hurried introduction to geocaching – an activity in which one uses a GPS receiver to locate a hidden “treasure.” There’s nothing obvious in that description about opening one’s heart.
And in fact many people do not. For many people, geocaching is about competition, being the first-to-find (FTF, in geo-jargon), amassing numbers of geocaches found, geocaches placed … you get the idea. If I played it that way, I wouldn’t have written the book Open Your Heart with Geocaching. Then again, if I played it that way, I wouldn’t exactly be … me. The reality is that, as is true with much of life, what you get from geocaching has everything to do with what you put into it. Seek competition, and it’s competition that you’ll find.
Geocaching brought me into the woods, and nothing has been quite the same for me since.
I’m a confirmed City Girl, and if there’s any wild place that I love, it’s the ocean, the wildness of the dunes of Cape Cod, the seals poking their heads out from the surface of the water, the sound of the surf. But what goecaching does is challenge you: instead of spending times in your own special places, it invites you to explore places that others think are special. I’ve seen, to quote the Babylon 5 character, “one moment of perfect beauty,” and it wasn’t in a place I had chosen to be – it was in a place that someone else had chosen and had led me to.
If that isn’t opening your heart, I don’t know what is!
Posted by: — jcezanne
|
Interesting. Like you, having spent most of my life as a New Yorker, and ten years in Boston, I was a confirmed city girl who occasionally enjoyed the beaches. It was my husband who opened my heart to the mountains.
Comment by lmercer — December 27, 2006 @ 3:45 pm
Amazing how these things happen. Thank goodness for geocaching — *and* for your husband! I hope that the readers of the series will find lots of ways to open their hearts, and perhaps via our books, open their hearts to the outdoors!
Comment by jcezanne — December 27, 2006 @ 3:48 pm
Interesting how competition can eventually lead us inward. It is usually ourselves who hold us back from all we can be. And discovering new places can lead us through that discovery of ourselves, too.
Cool that geocaching inherently leads this way…
Comment by Steve Hultquist — December 29, 2006 @ 5:17 pm