Flash Nonfiction

"Yet poetry is in Nature just as much as carbon is: love and wonder and the delight in suddenly seen analogy exist as necessarily as space, or heat, or Canada thistles.." Emerson, from April 1859








Sept. 14


Reading from a physician in Japan who speaks of the needs of Forest Bathing, its profound naturally occurring positive effects on the soul, psyche, body, and as I imagine days surrounding this one, back a few, forward a few, I begin to see, perhaps like others, those very comfort zones that seem to serve as ease and security as a mere walk in the park, a short run along the banks of the Yahara River, the short walk that it took from my car down to the banks of Lake Wingra where the great college building Mazzachuli sits. Do men and women alike share such visions of comfort? Has humanity succumbed to a 'nature' of things in which we have unknowingly extracted the very thing that offers to us, without any thinking, menace, selfishness, our very course of health? Such questions. Men spend miles in their minds and in their verbal work for the day it seems chasing something forever in which, if caught, more like trapped, and secured, that it might make them for once feel at fine east in the world, in which mind and action were placed in unison, and a love rose up through the self out into the world...naturally. Yet they have lost the very first step in the sequence! The very first steps are not found in hours bent over laboring against the numbers of accumulated success; they are not found in mere dreams of a more golden tomorrow; not necessarily in what they eat; how long they run around the lake; the extra thirty minutes bonding with their sons. These are the effects; the cause is the first connection, the very one that lingers in all of us like a ringing invisible fiber that runs throughout, what Wilson called Biophilia, and it is an understanding of our natural surroundings. Who does not chase in their hours the invisible catalogue of what we are supposed to be doing? Who does not long achingly to the very place where peace for all lies, the quietest, least desperate of all things? Dwindling nature does not cry or entertain and therefore it recedes in our imaginations for it is ultimately humble and far more stable in its own patterns than the human mind. Stars sometimes align. A thousand lights shine inside the mind and connect with the forever traveling lights of the universe.