“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”

Walt Whitman, Specimen Days

Humans wear me out. They always have. But this place I call home, this place that sits in the middle of an odd suburban experiment, this place that wants to be wild despite the intrusion of lines imposed on its edges and power lines crisscrossing the high spaces where tree branches sprawl and canopy, bucks in protest against all attempts to tame it — and remains wild at its heart— and mine. 

As we enter this green season, I’ll be wading into tall grasses, a bubbling creek, tangles of briers, and the shadow of tall trees so I can get lost in the woods and/but find myself. The incommensurable encounters in the human thicket are more complicated and challenging for me to parse and disentangle myself from but the former helps me comprehend, if not extricate myself from the latter when things get too prickly.