Yes, I do it in the woods. And in cities, and in difficult-to-find places, and in all sorts of venues you’d never think to find on your own.
“It,” of course, refers to geocaching. And I’ve written a book for this series about opening your heart with geocaching that will be out in May – and that may tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the hobby!
Geocaching has been described, tongue firmly planted in cheek, as a scavenger hunt that uses multi-million-dollar satellites to locate worthless toys.
That’s certainly one way of looking at it.
There’s another way, though: geocaching brings people closer to nature, closer to each other, and closer to things that bring them joy. That’s the way I see it, and that’s the way I’ve chosen to address it as part of the DreamTime series.
Geocaching is a fairly recent activity (though it has its antecedents in orienteering and letterboxing) made possible by access to the satellite Global Positioning System (GPS) that became available in May of 2000. A GPS unit is an electronic device that can determine your approximate location on the planet with coordinates given in longitude and latitude. People use it to navigate from a current location to another location.
The word “geocaching,” broken out, is geo for geography, and caching for the process of hiding a cache. A cache in computer terms is information usually stored in memory to make it faster to retrieve, but the term is also used in hiking/camping as a hiding place for concealing and preserving provisions; and of course caché is French for hidden.
So geocaching is looking for hidden treasure! Someone somewhere has found a place they love and has lured the geocacher to it by placing a cache there. Once she’s found the cache, the geocacher signs a logbook, may choose or not to exchange trinkets with the ones in the cache, and then later records her find on the geocaching website.
That’s geocaching in a nutshell. There is, however, much, much more to it, as we’ll explore in the next couple of months in these blogs, and as you’ll be able to read in May when Open Your Heart With Geocaching becomes available!
For me, the bottom line is this: geocaching enabled me to go into the woods, like Thoreau, like so many others before me; and, once there, I encountered more than I ever dreamed I would. I learned about nature, about community, about myself.
You could, too. All it takes is the desire to open your heart.
Posted by: — jcezanne
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