Tag: nature

Writing Practice – 2/25/2019

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A walk in the woods…

Footsteps crunch on brittle lanes. Pebbles scatter before the toe of my boot, startling and chasing away small creatures of 4 legs or no legs, the brown-and-green-and-yellow of a garter snake just barely registering in my mind before it disappears again into the underbrush. I hear chickadees calling, twit-tweet, twit-tweet, echoed falsely by jays, robins, maybe even a crow or a raven. I walk in my ignorance, knowing names of things, but not essences. I can hear bird songs, identifying that they are different, but I am no ornithologist. I cannot, with any certainty at all tell you which is the robin and which is the cardinal’s song. I can recognize their picture, but everything else is a false front. I know nothing for real; all I list on these walks is impostering.

I cannot tell you the difference between granite, quartz, shale, limestone, other than that they will be found in different layers, exposed as the winding streams have cut mercilessly into their hillsides over the last ten million years. Which must mean, then, that those same hillsides are far older than that, right? Which came first, ended up at the bottom of that pile, and will be exposed last: limestone or igneous rocks? See, I cannot even be sure I have the right kinds and thin categories. I have many facts within my head, but little use of them.

I cannot tell you, again, with any kind of certainty, whether you are looking at an aspen, a maple, or a boxwood cedar. I think I could reasonably tell you which is a birch, and maybe an oak; yet to distinguish an apple tree form a box elder would take much more expertise than I can bring.

It’s not that that I am ignorant. I care. I do. When I am in that environment, active, embedded, I listen to my guides and gurus, I understand what they say, I nod along when they explain how the leaves of this species are identified by the thick veining pattern on the underside of their leaves. I pay close attention as she points out the differences in this bark from that. I strain my hearing and indicate, with a subtle nod, that yes, I do hear the differences between the twoot-twoot-twoot of the whippoorwill and the tip-tip-toop-tip of the nuthatch. I concentrate, hard and expressively, on every word that helps me to differentiate the bluebells from the lady slippers growing beside the path. I am a good student, the best, and I ask insightful, meaningful questions, ones that inspire my guide, impress them with my ability to make connections between fauna and flora, that show I am not only paying attention, but that I care, and I will continue to care in the future, and that perhaps they have convinced another disciple, they have converted another recruit, they have a future bird-watcher or tree-hugger or trail-sustainer in their midst, and all their effort has not gone to waste, that I will come alongside them, and will come along behind them, and I will pick up their convservationist bent, and I will continue their work after they are gone, and I will pass that love and passion on to another and another, and another, and these great resources, these great forests, these trees and trails and pine-needle-strewn meadows, they will never disappear, they will always be with us, they will always remind us of our responsibility to care, to husband, to shepherd the world around us, as our responsibility and our privilege for the privilege of living the blessed life we do.

I will let them believe this, for I am a good person, and, then, I will finish my tour, I will walk out of the woods, I will knock the dust off my boots at the edge of the parking lot, and with that dust will fall my intention, my memory, my insightfulness, my burden to carry on their passion, their love of nature, their desire to see this world thrive for generations, centuries, millennia to come, and I will return to my life, my world, retaining nothing more of my experience than a few more names to add to the list of near-meaningless facts accumulating within my mind.

Writing Practice – 11/17/2018

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An acorn falls from a tree.

It bounces on the sidewalk, for this tree is inside a neighborhood. or, rather, the neighborhood was built around the tree. It has been here for two hundred years; the sidewalks for two decades. The acorn bounces along the hard surface and comes to rest against another pile of acorns, all very similar size, shape, color, consistency, for they have all fallen from the same tree in the past two days or so, have all bounced a couple of times on the sidewalk, all have rolled to his stop here in this pile at the base of the little slope, where the sidewalk makes a slight curve around, following the road.

In a few days there will be a thunderstorm, a big one, and at that time much of this pile of acorns will be swept away. They will tumble and roll, haphazardly forced into their swirling gambol by the flowing rainwaters, which will make their own way down the hill, around the curve (they are not impeded in their progress by such little inconveniences as curbs and humps), and then the rainwaters will flow into the storm sewer and take the acorns with them. They will waterfall down over this manmade edge, and will cascade into this manmade pit; and then follow this manmade riverbed for miles and miles and inside in the dark underground silently, and perseverantly making their way from high ground to the lower. They will flow with their acorn hitchhikers through the sewers and finally into the discharge zone, another manmade chute that looks like a huge, hollow phallus jutting out over the river, and once there they will emerge into the daylight, waters mingling with waters, acorns floating on the surface and bobbing, gently, repetitiously, until the river flow them away, away, away away neighbor.

The river flows on, inexorable, a much bigger bath than the rainwater or the acorns have yet experienced. It, too, moves at its own pace, sometimes flowing wide and slow, sometimes hurrying through a narrow channel, sometimes meandering back and forth in a serpentine path which takes many leagues to travel only a few kilometers, as the crow may fly.

Along the way the acorn dries in the sun. It may seem ironic to think of a waterlogged, floating acorn as dry, but that is exactly what happens. Part of it remains submerged, of course, but the tilted over part remains a little less than half of its apart body and exposed to the sun and the wind at all times, and so this particular acorn, nothing particular about it, really, remember, it was essentially just like all the others, it is floating on the river and making its way downstream, and all the time the sun’s baking the upside while the river leaches in, or at least tries, to, from the underside. Soon the hard-backed edge begins to flick away, at the eroding insistence of the wind, or at the teeth and claws of passing sparrows, or at the random insistence of a wandering mayfly or mosquito or midge.

These things take their toll on our beloved acorn. Before its journey along the river has ended, our hero has become much less. Weather-worn and hollow, hollowed out, [illegible] [illegible] [illegible] of some future out or nothing more than the floating shell of its former self, all of the good, rich, hearty valuable fats and proteins inside hollowed out by the destruction of water.

All that is left is for the shell to float, undisturbed now, on the rover for these last few distances, until the river mouth empties in to the wide ocean.

And from there? Well, the story has just begun.

Writing Practice – 1/15/18 – Describe how the rain smells to you:

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Describe how the rain smells to you:

The rain smells like washed grass. It smells like renewal and refreshment. Rain smells like the stirring up of old trail leaves when you’re out on a bike and the clouds have rolled in and the fat, warm drops bombard the detritus composting on the side of the trail, kicking up a dust of smell like regeneration.

The rain snails like opportunity – the chance to get out of the safety and comfort, the security of a house, a roof, walls, to walk through a field, the water landing haphazard on my shoulders, arms, [illegible], feeling little ploshes of backsplash off my cheeks onto my eyes, making me squint, making me raise a hand to wipe my eyes, stretching a smile across my face as I appreciate the connections between myself, here in this field, open, inviting, interested, connected between myself and voles and the ravens and the snails who live like this, who do not hide from nature, who do not hide from this nature, from the natural experience they have symbioted through for the past million years, they do not avoid the past, where they came from, where they were, who their ancestors were, they turn in to those ancient memories imprinted into their mind and into their psyche and into their instincts, they do not avoid it out of fear or weakness or some misguided desire for comfort, for peace, for ease.

I avoided those things, I avoided real, I avoided nature, I avoided my heritage, for so long, for TOO long, until this moment, until this image came down from the sky, a divine, heavenly blessing of reality, a grace, a perfection of experience, a true picture as simple of the way I used to be, of the way we all used to live, and I appreciate it, I revel in it, I glory in it. To be myself in the harmony, the resonance between myself and the world, I cannot but touch god through its raindrop tendrils. I feel a bond between us and though this will last, not forever, but at least as long as I desire, until I break, until I release, until I disappear away from this perfection back into the obscurity of security and safety, so I will revel in that while at the same time missing this, mourning this, wishing this, that I must release back to the sky.