Author finds internal renewal, too, in a Minnesota spring

Under a peerless cobalt-blue sky, birds chirped and raptors sashayed in midair. A wetland groaned as it thawed. A majestic white-tailed deer was bracketed against naked hardwoods. I was on The Trail, as one of my dearest friends named it, officially known as the Louisville Swamp unit of the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge between Chaska and Jordan along the Minnesota River.

On a comfortable morning not long ago, I traversed the unit's upper-story parameter of oak savanna grassland — one of my favorite landscapes — as a sort of prelude to spring. Partly frozen leaves trampled underfoot, I hiked alone for nearly 90 minutes and exhaled the morning air and took in all nature's happenings above. I couldn't help but reflect on my existence and how much it's changed, spring as life metaphor. For the first time in years, I was truly content.

Spring is the season of rebirth, of emerging beauty, of boundless hope. It's also one of transition. Since September 2010, I've been living one long transition. That morning, hunting doves with my late black Lab, a splash of tiny black dots suddenly appeared in my left eye, which seemed to foreshadow the personal and professional calamities that lay ahead.

The short story is that, through several retinal detachments and severe tears, and more surgeries, maddening convalescence and chronic pain than I care to recount, I lost all vision in my left eye and some in my right. I was forced to give up hunting. My intimate relationship with the outdoors, burnished at the knee of my father as a young boy and professionally as an outdoors writer, was severed.

The unabridged story is even more complicated. On these pages in autumn 2014 on the same subject, I posed a question: Who am I now? That vexing question of self-identity has consumed me. In fact, it nearly killed me.

Before this odyssey, I was living a life in full. Or so I thought. I had a good-paying dream job that allowed me to write about waterfowl and waterfowl hunting from destinations across North America. Within reason, I could buy anything and travel anywhere. My identity revolved around my job and my personal trips hunting and fly-fishing. It was the good life, and on my terms.

But my vision loss (and eventual job loss, among many other setbacks) upended my universe. From the start, I was determined not to let my relative disability define me. Many people, I told myself, had overcome far more. So, well before I was ready physically, psychologically and spiritually, I pushed myself back into the outdoors.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind has been called fear. In my case, I felt fear of the unknown in that moment, and I had a streamside meltdown befitting a small child.

I pridefully abandoned nature after other attempts at reimmersion, and retreated to the relative safety of what I could control. Yet, it became my prison. I became risk-averse — another alien feeling — and spent most of my time in nature walking asphalt paths at nearby parks. I conned myself into thinking they were backcountry hikes. I sometimes even wore a backpack.

Although my physical circumstances had changed, I was not ready to change. If I couldn't live the outdoors life I had grown accustomed to over 40-plus years, I wouldn't lead one at all.

Ironically, I abandoned nature and its incredible capacity to heal. Not only had I lost my vision, I had lost all perspective.

Sometimes you have to die a little before you find yourself again. I did. Many years ago, I wrote that you can't spend any meaningful time in unparalleled beauty of nature and not believe in a God above. I have always had a deep reservoir of faith. And while I've questioned it occasionally and rarely spoke of it, it's never left me. The difference between then and now is that I'm actually living my faith. My circumstances taught me the most valuable lesson of my life: It's not about me.

My true identity lies in my faith in God. A passage in the Book of Matthew sums it up best: "If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you'll find both yourself and me."

My outdoors life will never be the same. But now I embrace it from a different vantage point. For the first time in my life, my sight picture is unblemished. I have a lot to give, too. I have a life's worth of practical outdoors experience to impart and that's what I'm doing. A kid down the street wants to learn to fly cast, and at some point this spring he will. Still another kid wants to learn to blow a duck call; he will, too.

On The Trail the other morning, I felt a deep gratitude for all my family and friends who have stuck with me. I may have abandoned them for a time, but they never abandoned me.

In spring — that time of rebirth, emerging beauty, boundless hope and transition — lifelessness can become life again.