Driving the back roads of New Jersey I realize I am hopelessly lost. The directions I’ve been given are incomplete. Neither the map nor my GPS show the road I am traveling, which turns out to be a dead end. I turn around – again, and stop at a small town gas station for directions. The man behind the counter shrugs when I tell him where I’m trying to go. “Never heard of it.” He looks at a delivery driver waiting to pay for a diet Coke. “You know this place?”

“Yeah,” the driver says, “I heard of it,” and then he shrugs too and says, “but you can’t get there from here.”

“What?”

“You gotta go there to get there.”

He points out the window vaguely west. I get out pencil and paper to capture a long set of directions that involve looping back over roads multiple times and strange crossings. I try to write it all down, but it’s impossible to keep up. The driver takes pity on me.

“I’ll get you started,” he says.

Hoping he is not a serial killer or the village idiot, I find myself following a giant commercial Red Wing delivery van down a winding country road. At a breathless speed, I follow the Red Wing van two miles, up and down a ribbon of hills, around corners graced with sunflowers and the occasional sheep. We cross a bridge over a stony stream, then a one-lane span over a dry creek, and yet another bridge over a bona fide river. As we travel, the directions are all starting to make sense. Sometimes, I can see the road I want to be on, but there really is no direct way to get to it – I have to follow the road I’m on, around hill and over dale to arrive at my destination. It’s a lesson I relearn over and over again. My desire for efficiency and straight line travel from A to B is repeatedly sidelined for a more interesting, and in the end, more complete journey.

There are few straight lines in nature. Every woodland path curves, every river wanders, every tree, cloud, or pond has ragged edges. Even the straight lines of a snowflake, a crystal, or a stone face have corners and junctions. It’s good to remember that. Nature’s navigation signs are often subject to change and open to interpretation.

An eye to the sky can forecast rain or snow or approaching nightfall. Clouds reveal wind direction and speed. Haze or clarity indicates air quality, and the color of sky itself reveals temperature, season and even latitude. The presence of certain birds reveals proximity to open meadow, farm fields, woods, a body of water or other wildlife. We read the signs – rain coming, river nearby, – road kill ahead, but we each interpret the signs a little differently than the person next to us because both literally and figuratively we are standing in a slightly different place, -the whole “eye of the beholder” thing. We literally see a different sky.

My husband tends to keep things factual, employing clinical observation for practical application. I tend to flights of fancy – pictures in clouds, imagined conversations among wildlife, Olympic drama playing out on distant mountains. My here, is not the same “here” for the person next to me, and likely, neither is our final destination. From cradle to grave, getting from here to there is often a solitary and circuitous effort. On rare occasions, the morning light on snowy peaks or the sight of sun drenched wheat fields rolling out like liquid gold holds us and our fellow travelers captive in the same magical moment. Our internal compasses connect, and while perhaps we can’t get there from here – we did get here from there at the same time. For just a brief instant, we stand on common ground in a shared experience of wonder, grateful for whatever road brought us here.