“I must go in, the fog is rising.”
Emily Dickinson
The fog came rolling over my fence while I slept and curled itself around the house this morning. When I woke it had already wound its way through the trees out back in a thick blanket of quiet. As Charlie and I wandered through the gate and out into the forest for our morning walk, it told the twigs beneath my boots to hush and poured itself with such abandon into the air that every breath I took nearly burst with water molecules.
After our walk I cozied up in front of the computer with a steaming mug of coffee and tried to look up fog quotes to capture the way it feels. If you ever find yourself doing so, you’ll find that most of those quotes are sad and lonely. Most of them talk of darkness and getting through to the other side. There’s some attempts at deep philosophy about how fog is necessary to make us love the sun. There’s even all kinds of nonsense about being lost.
That’s not how I feel.
“I must go in, the fog is rising.”
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson supposed quoted the above words just before her death. And perhaps that makes them melancholy. But not for me. I get her. Exactly why she said it. Perhaps you can only feel affection for the fog if you like yourself. If you’re comfortable in your own head and company. Perhaps, if you’re like me, you might even love it if you know what magic happens in the fog – when all the world is shut away except yourself and the things of earth that are close enough to touch. When you become just another part of nature and you’re surrounded and held safe and all the mysteries of the world suddenly seem possible and real.
Fog brings such a person to the door of a thin place. And that person knows – Adventure waits on the other side of the doorknob if you just walk through it.


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