"If we can somehow retain places where we can always sense the mystery of the unknown, our lives will be richer." Sigurd Olson, from "Mystery and the Unknown" Reflections from the North Country






There is no easier thing to do for the modern man than to lose touch with nature.  At no other time in the history of mankind has there been so many other things to keep us occupied, distracted, and thinking we're invisibly busy.  Many values associated with connection to nature, whatever that might mean for any given person, have in fact convoluted to the point that experiencing nature for its own sake is generally looked down upon as silly or not entertaining.  Those more modern ideas take hold and become, like virtually everything else, 'popular.' The question comes up: what is in nature for me?  What do I get from it? It's not that exciting. I don't really want to think about nothing, or certainly not that I am connected.  Many know that this is clearly a wrong perception, but how to fix it when there is no there 'there?'

This is quite possibly the very crux of the problem of the modern mind: we don't actually know earth, our place in it, or our connection to it. As exaggerated as this no doubt sounds, the evidence that it is verifiably true is constant and impossible to miss.  When asked what do you do? the modern person will provide a litany of details that cling to the multiple interfaces with a virtual and digital world.  How to navigate the circular bubbles that are apps on phones? Affirmative.  What it means as you walk along the creakily boarded trail of a lush rehabilitated woodland prairie swamp? Well, what for? There is nothing happening except for the brief chatter of a bird, bugs stirring under the weeds and the wind is not cooperating.

To enter into the mind of the woodland swamp takes much time and energy.  To conceive that the great filtering mass of green below and tree above is a collection of molecules nearly identical to those found in the human body is inconceivable, detestable.  And yet, as the walker moves along the sloshing edges of that trail and hears and hears the last of the croaking frogs wildly going about her business, the hawk hover and squeal, and the water seep through the minute filaments of each crooked shank of cattail reed, he is witnessing a pulsing health that he can only wish was as greenly

thriving inside the ventricles of his own heart, his bones, his body, his mind.  The Zen have been remarking for centuries that it is the quiet mind that knows the quiet tree, for they are, upon contact, the same thing.  I do wonder what has happened when the mind filled with the flapping lips of the sixth TV talk show host of the day or the squalid contours of empty chat rooms, dark, empty, non organic, can no longer see himself as the swampland willow tree? There is little mystery in mastering the game of visible digital chunks laced across the screen by nothing more than cathode ray tubes and artificial pixels.  The mystery lies inside the molecules of the roots which have no end, are meaning itself, and breath. One mind is shallow, but does not know it; the other deep and always has.