Or even sit on her, skin to skin with the planet?
When did you last touch a tree, bare-handed, to marvel at the roughness?
When did you last say hello to a bird? And mean it?
In my readings I find fiction to be a welcome respite. I “save” books about nature for later because we always save the best things for last, right? Sometimes it’s hard to pick them up and read them, because they FEEL so strongly, and my heart wants to vibrate out my throat until I’m sobbing because very few of us truly care anymore. I feel it so deeply when I read these treasured nature writings that I hoard like my favorite dessert, because I want to savor them in ways that feel so bare and naked and full that they’re almost indecent.
Humans these days seem so determined to separate themselves from our Mother Nature. More than ever we forget we are animals. In a world insulated with plastic and metal and concrete we might as well be aliens from other planets for how much in touch we are with ours.
The last time I slept upon the ground it was Faire season, four months ago, and yet it feels like years. I loathe the Texas summers that make you feel you’re walking in hot soup, breathing liquid, cooking in the sunshine, as everything around me gets crispy and dry from the heat. Leaves don’t fall here because of a change of season, they simply dry up and slide away in the 100 degree weather. I break out in heat rashes this time of year, ones that burn and itch and drive me to madness, steal my sleep, I have to more than once stop myself from slicing my skin free for relief. The sun keeps me from our Mother, so I go to bed early so I can wake before it rises, walk in the soupy air, smell the bark of the trees.
In the dark, the world of man is quieter, and it’s just me and the moon and the bat song diminishing as crickets still sing and birds shake themselves awake.
I carry in my pocket a small buck’s eye seed for luck, a piece of wood from the inside of an old rotting stump, generations old, a small crystalized hag’s stone I found on the trail, a pinch of dirt from my garden. A little magic to keep me connected, perhaps to keep me safe, to let me be invisible to man’s eye so that the trees will embrace me.
I used to listen to music on my walks but stopped as it’s too distracting. Without the music I can hear the rustles of leaves to my left and say good morning to our brother armadillo, without the music I can smell the mushrooms he’s looking for and smile knowing he’s about to hit a good patch. Without human music noise I can hear the quick exhalation of the small buck and his does to my right and walk a bit lighter so as to not frighten them away. I can’t hear the trees calling my name when humans sing in my ears so I choose silence and realize it never was quiet at all. We just make so much noise in our lives now we forget how to listen.
In the world we have created with the internet everything feels so manufactured and unreal. Is it any surprise that laying on the ground seems unnatural or quirky or something other people do, people not us, people not me, those “weirdos”?
Our children spend their time watching YouTube videos or playing games in a world that doesn’t exist, and forget about the real one outside the window. It doesn’t matter to them. Our generation failed them in allowing forgetfulness and plastic and glass and bits of metal to come between them and reality. When the internet and cell towers go down it’s the end of the world for them because they eat fake food and live in manufactured environments and have forgotten how to read paper maps, forgotten how to find their way.
And so I save the books that mean the most to me…with their pages smelling of sleeping trees and ink, I save them for the red string that is bound tight between my heart and the wild places, because it pulls so strongly it hurts. It hurts to be reminded that most people out there don’t feel that searing tension from the mountains pulling us back to them.
Those words written by others as enamored of freedom as I am, they’re a cherished thing, meant to be savored like earth’s last drop of untainted water.
I swirl their words on my tongue before I speak my own, and take my son to sleep on the ground and leave nothing man-made between him and the soil. I teach him to read paper maps and put down his screens to gaze on the moon. I show him how rocks can hold him long after I’m gone, and how they echo eons if he’d just learn to listen.
A Burd in Flight 