My inspiration comes from wild nature and rural life found among Maine’s peaks and valleys. Traveling alone

in quiet woodlands is often a paddle and hike journey, one that reveals  powerful moments, uncovering

deeper beauty and artistic possibility to my human eye, mind and heart.

I walk floodplains, paddle rivers and lakes, hike mountains, bush-whack ridges to access remote outcrops.

Lines on a USGS map or aerial photograph provide clues about where to go - what to look for. Why

here, not there? Place-based knowledge, plus a well-honed forester's instincts coupled to light

and weather suggests to me, go here, now! Yet, inspired beauty can be easily found behind

the house on our two and one-half acre pine-fir-maple-aspen forest.

In my life, I’ve lived near strip mines, rural sprawl and shopping malls, tobacco farms, rolling clearcuts
and wind farm arrays marching to distant horizons. Humans, so tangled up in drive-by-digitized

recording, often fail to see the forest and the trees. Do we stop-look-listen long enough to consider the

immediate beams of natural light, little things like the snake in the grass, or where the dark of

night might actually be, unpopulated by blinking red lights and the whirl of commerce all night long?

Outlying remote lands are disappearing fast from all points on the comapss. Will my cherished discovered

places along streams through the forest be here long after I've left this life? Or will progress carelessly pave over, light

up and noise-ify all I have come to know as beautiful, wild Maine? Nature and the people of the Maine Woods

remain my most intimate known sense of person and place. Indeed, this is my inspiring sanctuary.

This I know to be true… The emergence of beauty comes from immersion, when we step deeper into the 

woods and waters, where we sense and feel the beauty around us and within us being humanly alive. The late

Galen Rowell opened this door for me, “don’t leave when the sun sets. Hang out in that long fleeting hour of

magic light, ‘till the purple dusk fades to black'.” This is why I'm here, packing up for another out of truck - off the

trail journey, deeper into the Maine Woods, to touch and feel and and experience whatever

my human eye, mind and heart might encounter

along these paths less traveled.

 

--- Roger Merchant