David Newland

I see it’s been over a month since I last wrote in this space. Time’s flown as I’ve been breaking trail with Roots Music Canada – writing, editing, hosting interviews, and trying to build a business.

Creative and business endeavours have something in common: they involve making things up that didn’t exist before. They are acts of imagination. You see something in your mind, and you try to make it real.

I’ve long accepted the role that imagination plays in those pursuits, but just recently had occasion to see the imaginative faculty in a new light.

The setting was Killarney Park, in the heart of the Canadian Shield at the northern shore of Georgian Bay. I was winter camping with my daughter, and we spent quite a bit of time snowshoeing through the empty winter woods.

Except that they’re not empty, of course. We saw chickadees, blue jays, hawks, eagles, porcupine and deer. The forest is alive, even in the dead of winter. And what we didn’t see draws an even more vibrant picture of the life of a forest than what we did.

There are tracks everywhere in the winter snow. I’m no expert, but I’ve studied a bit of tracking and can identify a few things. The footprints in the snow told us fox, rabbits, wolves, deer, bobcats, raccoons, squirrels, mice, grouse and all sorts of other creatures were out and about, living their lives among the rocks and trees all around us – even if we couldn’t see them.

That’s a powerful thought in itself; it reminds me of the way possibilities may be latent in our circumstances, visible if only we could read the sign. But there’s more to tracks than that.

If you know how to look for some basic clues, tracks will tell you all kinds of deeper information: what direction the animal was traveling, what size it was, what it was after, how fast it was moving, and especially, when it moved over the land you’re standing on. They’re like an analog recording in that way, like their namesake, the tracks on a record. When you read the tracks, it’s like playing back the record, and the landscape comes alive in space and time.

In your mind’s eye and ear and nose you can see and hear and smell the animals move. Watch them walk or waddle, hear them sniff or squeak, smell their musk as they turn and run. That’s what happens when you take information – actual facts, literally what happened on the ground – and feed them into the imagination. In this instance, the imagination isn’t just about making new ideas concrete. It’s about generating a virtual scene that is as close as the information will allow to what actually happened.

When I walk in the woods I walk in time and sense and awareness as well as space. And this for me may be the imagination’s greatest gift: not what could be, but what IS. The present, after all, includes the energy and the influence of the past, and it’s imagination that brings it all into fluid timelessness in the moment.

I realize as I try to pass this stuff on to my daughter that while she can grasp the concept, she may not be able to feel the flow. I couldn’t at her age, even as a kid who literally lived in the woods. It took time, training, insight, maturity, and experience to gain that modicum of understanding that makes the moment so alive today.

So I don’t expect my daughter to understand where all this leads me, let alone where it might lead her.

But I’m leaving her my own tracks – like these meandering notions – to follow as best she can, if and when she chooses.

I think maybe that’s about all a dad can do.