I am a child of the Earth. I am most connected in the natural, non-human world. It's more than a preference or simple misanthrope; although those are both true of my personality to a degree. At my core - at a genetic level - I belong to the natural world.
When I am walking through the crisp woods toward the East end of my mother-in-law's fifty acres, the smells pitch and earth soften my temperament. The crunching of leaves from scurried movements and resonant bullfrog ballads don't unnerve me; on the contrary, they unwind muscles knotted from weeks and months 'away'. Even my breath slows-...in...and...out..., methodically, in unison with the wind and trees.
I have learned to find my nature wherever I am.
At present, I am cocooned on my front porch, listening to the understated roar of pouring rain. Sirens wail in the far distance, the sparrow's descant of the modern day. Truck tires cling to the wet roads, the rolling and ripping leaf crunching that is the sounds of movement in the brick and mortar world.
Author Hugo Hamilton once said, "Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind.
Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the
map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you
visit, full of books and films you've been to. " I think 'country' equates to home. Home is not where you were born, your country of origin, or even where your parents are - it is where you long to be. It is where you feel complete, a sense of being whole, part of something greater and yet simpler.
Nature is my home.
I like your fourth paragraph very much: it's a mood piece, a bit of a prose poem, visual, sensitive, insightful.
ReplyDeleteI realize reading this that, as a reader, I'm not much of a thinker. I read your thinking here and can certainly follow what you say because you say it so well, but for this reader--and it's my loss--the thoughts have much less bite than that graf 4 with its description of senses and sensations.