Spend enough time in the woods and you develop a sense of whether it’s a bird or a deer or even a snake, and it happens before you can even turn your head to see.
You can’t control nature any more than you can teach a cat to tap dance.
To simply exist and observe, to notice the small things happening around you, to be aware of your body as an element of the landscape.
I had no fear during that earthquake, and frankly never have in any that I’ve experienced. Which some people have told me is strange.
It represents a fool’s errand in human pursuits and is as about as common as hen’s teeth in nature.
Even just staring up into the branches was a joy, watching the sky sparkle through shifting gaps in the foliage.
Sand below us, water in front of us, the great mountain sitting huge in the blue haze to our right.
You feel you are swimming in a saturated, soporific concoction of apricot, honey, and hypnagogia, with undercurrents of the autumn sun’s penetrating warmth.
Soft stridulations waft like lithe wisps of wood smoke on the gentle evening breeze, the crickets calling tenderly under the waxing crescent moon.
Many years later, I laid down and gazed up from the floor of the Gobi Desert, a place with a sky so dark that the Milky Way practically slaps you in the face. There’s no missing it.
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