It has become a truism for those who care about such things that “we are a part of nature, not apart from nature.” Yet it is hard to remember this, or, at least, to feel it in your bones while living in the clutter and clatter of urban reality.
I’m currently house- and dog-sitting for some friends back in northern Minnesota where we lived for 25 years. A little home carved out of the woods, surrounded by lakes, bird song, whispering pines, and the comforting breathing of my little buddy, Sevi the dog, the “scourge of Turtle River.” All very romantic on the surface. But also the world of septic systems, wells and pumps, “corduroy” gravel roads, guns, pickup trucks, and mosquitoes.
I remember once coming back from a trip to the east coast and, while driving home in the dark from our little local airport, seeing a man on the side of the road cutting the head off a road-kill deer with a chain saw to get the rack of antlers to hang on his wall. It was not a romantic image. Life here is what you make it.
But if you calm down and let the rhythms overtake you, the sheer space around you becomes space around your thoughts and emotions, and the nature from which you’ve been separated in the city moves in on you and claims you. Without knowing it, you become part of her and she of you.
I often marvel at how I was able to carve out a career while living here 100 miles from the nearest freeway, where the only hint of culture was an earnest little town that was slowly being choked to death by a soulless strip of low-end franchises and dollar store drek.
Now, being here, out in the woods, I remember.
The silence surrounds me, the singularity of everything is set in stark relief — the visits with friends, the susurrating pines, the convenience stores — all of it. Life becomes a series of encounters, and each has a wholeness to it that doesn’t happen when you are making your way through the non-stop assault of urban reality.
Being here is a reminder that this is all nature, both what we have received and what we have done with it. It is at once a celebration and an indictment of the choices we as humans have made.
I’m glad to have been able to document this in some way in my writing. And it is not merely in the subject matter I’ve addressed. It is in the mindset, born of this land, that made me cast everything in high relief and move slowly and reflectively across the landscape of my observations, honoring the gifts of the senses more than the complexity of my thoughts. I have tried to give this to you, my readers, as my small way of paying my rent for my time on earth.
And so I tip my hat to this land where I have returned. This land of mosquitoes, shimmering lakes, convenience stores, septic systems, whispering pines, beheaded deer, and Sevi the dog, who is about to get his morning walk.
I am part of it and it is part of me.
It made me who I am as a writer, and I am grateful for that.
And I miss it.
