“There was only wind drawing itself endlessly over the dark crowns of the pines, over the face of the water, over the mountains’ icy peaks, over the great wide golden stretches of the teeming land. The wind passed, even as it is passing now, over all the people who find themselves so dulled by the concerns of their own bodies and their own hungers that they cannot stop for a moment to feel its goodness as it brushes against them. And feel it now, so soft, so eternal, this wind against your good and living skin.”
― Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds
The thing that got me thinking was the book The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. I read it toward the end of 2023, right before Winter Solstice, when the landscape in northern New England becomes anemic. I felt this book in my bones. A woman wandering alone in the wilderness, away from the hell she knows, toward a sort of redemption she never imagined. Were she not a fictional character, she might even have been one of my ancestors, and I imagined her as this.
It’s 400 years later, and I live in the woods, surrounded by trees and mountains and air. Yet I rarely make time to go outside in a conscientious way. And this is the whole crux of the problem.
Some of my strongest and best memories of being a kid were of being alone in the woods. The forest around my childhood home is mostly maples and shimmery metallic birch trees with their curiously peeling bark. In these parts, crumbling stone walls can appear out of nowhere to demarcate territory that’s long since overgrown with understory.
The damp cold of late winter rolling into early spring. Fetid mushrooms silently connected by their invisible underground mycelium. Fallen rotting logs sprouting fresh seedlings. (There is a word for this; I forget what it is?) The hot pine aroma of summer: my favorite smell in the world. An owl softly screaming through the night. And the unquestionable best of all the things: a coyote pack conducting roll call just after dark. Listen!
I don’t get outside nearly enough anymore, and of course, it’s fitting that it took a novel I read curled up in bed in my cozy warm house to make me think about my missed connection to nature.
I’ve read a lot of great novels about trees and nature in the last few years, just a short list including:
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The Overstory by Richard Powers
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Greenwood by Michael Christie
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The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
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Wild by Cheryl Strayed
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Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson
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The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Tova Bailey
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Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
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Coyote America by Dan Flores
But a book cannot replicate the still knowing of being outside, alone, in the woods. I started looking for a word that would represent my intention for 2024, and I arrived on this one:
(Thank you, Merriam Webster, for your wise words.)
Biophilia is, interestingly, a trendy new interior design term that I’m also not mad at. From Metropolis, a good article worth reading if architecture interests you:
Considering I recently counted 42 houseplants in my very small home, I am on track here.
This year, I also commit to getting outside more, to honor the priceless gift of fresh air, to noticing the places where nature intersects with being human in this hyper-civilized time, to remember that my body is animal, to respecting the kinship of other creatures, to always stop and listen to the coyotes, and to pause to witness the moon in all its incarnations. Also, and perhaps you consider this ironic, to read more books about it all.
Wonderful reflection.You brought me to the forest.