Hiking with Words

I love serendipity as a word because it smells like flowers and butterflies and happenstance, but I love the word solivagant even more.

I’ve never laid eyes on this word – solivagant – until it popped up in a prompt. So, I had to look it up and when I did, I marveled at how it fit my morning at the dog park where it was so wonderfully wet that I had to wear my beloved mud boots.

Solivagant, if you don’t know and you likely don’t, means “to wander alone, a solitary traveler or wanderer.”

It was only a walk along the muddy paths of the dog park but when no one there, the dog park can feel wild like a forest. I can envision hiking on my own, say, traveling the Pacific Crest Trail with a backpack, a sleeping roll, and a walking stick carved from some tree. And maybe a dog.

I will never hike the Pacific Crest Trail but that’s not important. What’s important is the envisioning. I might not be a solivagant in reality, but I can see myself being one. All I have to do is look down at my boots.