How refreshing this blending of a human approach to nature (your approach to hunting, after all it's not all about filling the freezer) and a glimpse simultaneously into the darker side of human unconsciousness. Totalitarianism is most insidious as it hides as in our beloved once indigenous location. Be well!
Your reflections on nature interspersed with with reflections on your grandparents, and exile, made me think about the differences between land, place and home. I have always admired the connection you have with your land; how bound up it is in how you live, and how beautifully you write about it. But these descriptions are so remote from my experience, as someone who has always lived in or close to large cities on the Northeast seaboard (and spent hardly any time in the woods as an adult). I must confess feeling little or no connection with land, anywhere.
But what I do feel some connection with is place and home. Just ask any New Yorker - you won't hear anything about the land, or the rivers, or the sky. They love the skyline, the neighborhoods, the people, the noise, the culture, the chaos. Even the parks are loved as city spaces first and foremost. As for me, even if I never move back to New Haven, I'll always feel love for my dysfunctional but vital little city. Springsteen's "My Hometown" and all that. You have sometimes written of your time in Moscow, and your associations with certain places there. My very early years were in Washington D.C., and even today, if I were driving in on I-95 I know I would get that odd homesick feeling in my stomach as soon as I glimpsed the big Mormon temple right off the Beltway.
Maybe these are trivial examples and I'm splitting hairs. But it does lead me to wonder how much it matters what kind of land, and place, or neighborhood, you grew up in. Did I mention this book by Quill Kukla? It looks really neat - different from what you write about but for some reason it made me think of your blog:
Oh, I think there is a ton here! The Center for Humans and Nature (https://humansandnature.org) focuses a lot of their writing and energy on exactly the feelings of belonging and placemaking and nature in cities and their head editor (I think) published a book about the coyotes of Chicago, or one coyote (I haven't read it yet but Sarah Boon had a short interview with him about it for Undark: https://undark.org/2019/03/15/five-questions-for-gavin-van-horn/).
When I was researching my walking book, I came across a lot of studies about how the places we live, including architecture, shape our minds and mental health and outlook. There is a lot of interesting stuff on that.
In any case, I like that you've brought up the distinction I keep making, even if unintentionally, because land connection and place connection. Is there a difference? I feel deeply connected to the land I grew up in, but I don't think my friends who grew up in cities are necessarily any less connected to those places. Do you need to experience many nights sleeping under a quiet, starry sky to feel a sense of belonging and connection? I wouldn't necessarily say so. There might be an argument to be made about being able to connect to life on the planet, but there again, part of the whole point of the Center for Humans and Nature is to show how much of that life thrives in cities.
It was either my dad or my cousin who said once years ago that a person is always most connected to the kind of place they grew up in. I think it was my cousin, who like my father grew up in Leningrad. He disagreed with her because he feels most at home in Montana even though he didn't move here until he was in his 30s. But then we reminded him that he was born and spent his early years in a village in the Ural Mountains. Even though he mostly grew up in Leningrad, did that memory of mountains and trees and nature linger? Who knows.
I don't think they're trivial examples. It's these kinds of questions that help us reconnect to life in all its variations. I've lived in several cities both in the U.S. and overseas and have very visceral memories of all of them. Except for maybe Boston, I have a lot of fondness for them! Even as homesickness plagued me. But humans have resided in larger communities for millennia. Maybe what matters is how we shape them and what we connect to within them.
Do you know, I've only ever driven through New Haven, never stopped?
I do think there is a distinction between land and place, somehow - just maybe not one that is sharp or systematic, or always necessary. Kind of like humans and nature. Place to me usually implies culture, and civilization - people - along with nature, but it always started out as land (and will return to being land, once all the humans are gone).
Most people just drive through New Haven and never stop (except to check out Yale campus or go get the famous pizza - literally the only two things most people know about the city). Boston is actually the only other place I lived for any length of time besides New Haven, D.C. (and now, Ontario), and oddly enough I do have lots of visceral associations - but it's a weird, not-very-friendly place, so not surprising you wouldn't feel attached.
And by the way: I feel bad always dropping random readings - obviously I wouldn't expect you to read them all, it's just fun to share - but also meant to include this great Twitter thread I came across recently, which for obvious reasons immediately made me think of you:
That is a fantastic thread! I printed it out and am getting that paper she references downloaded. Thank you! (Don't feel bad dropping random readings. They're always interesting!)
I didn't like Boston at all, for a number of reasons, mostly because as you put it, it's a weird, not-very-friendly place. Also the coffee is terrible ;)
I lived for 12 years in barely-upstate New York, and when we moved there I was finishing grad school in Boston, so spent a year driving back and forth through Connecticut every week. Which is, I have to say, a much prettier state than I ever imagined while I was growing up in Montana. But I only went the longer route that took me through New Haven a couple of times.
I think your observation that "place usually implies culture" is a key to the question. My instinct is always that connection to land requires fewer human creations around, but I want to try to push against that a lot, because it seems to imply that other types of connections are degraded or lesser somewhere, and I don't think that's true. But It's something I'm going to have to think about a LOT more.
Somehow I missed this comment. Hadn't seen that piece but I think I came across a couple of tweets with the photos. Incredible. There is so much going on around us ecologically that should be in the top of the news all the time.
This is such a beautiful read, I've enjoyed re-reading and thinking about it the past couple of days. I too have hunted and appreciate the immersion, the attention to the land, the surroundings, the animals, that deep knowledge that comes with it as a feeling more than anything articulate. I love that you wrote about that--and you also write so eloquently about how it relates to our sense of identity, our connections to land, to histories both foreign and local, familial and global. The nuance in all of it is what makes it both hard and filled with longing--that desire for connection to place, to allow place to mean something to us. I think about that so much having moved to Alaska a bit reluctantly and coming to find I love it but that it took twenty years--and part of that was having the ability to come to love it on terms I could recognize and find myself in, and I wonder about that too. As a settler I'm complicit in a history of colonization, and I still question what right or connection I have to call this place home. My settler ancestors lived in Oregon, but they were not Indigenous to that land, and I resent the rancher/settler multi-generation claims so many in Oregon and other places make to a place. But I also loved Oregon and felt a homesickness for it for years and still do. And yet there is conflict in that homesickness too. And I think that's right because it shouldn't be easy but I feel so strongly that we should know the history and natural history and culture of the places we live, that we should feel connection to the places we live in. We ignore place the same way we ignore the relationships we build outside of family. We allow society too often to tell us the rules of the game and we follow to our--and the land's--detriment. We need to pay attention. Really loved reading this.
Thank you so much for all of this, Freya. These are such thoughtful, in-depth responses that resonate a lot with me. This especially: “to allow place to mean something to us.” I can think of so many who would chafe at this but it feels like not a bad thing to take a deep pause, maybe for years, and sink into the import of that and the questions behind it. Humans are wanderers of the earth but also linked to place and ecosystem. All of that holds so much more potential for every one of us than the past few centuries have allowed.
I admire how you’ve struggled to connect to a land you didn’t love. I lived in upstate New York for 12 years (the other 8 years were in cities, there’s another topic!) and kept trying to coax myself into loving it but it never happened. Sometimes light would slant through the fields in a way that evoked a sense of home, and I loved the ubiquitous red-winged blackbirds standing on cattails and there was one stream-river I liked to visit. But I never managed to feel anything stronger for the place than acceptance and far too much of the time it was simply resignation. For you to have worked through to another side of that is really admirable to me.
This feels like an ongoing conversation I’d love to keep having with other people contemplating what it all means, and learning to care for places. Or be cared for in return.
This is such a great piece Nia that I feel like I could write an entire essay in response to it. I so admire your deep thinking and how you can coherently organize so many cogent thoughts. It is impressive.
This: "What does it mean to have freedom of mind, to not have your thinking and worldview shaped by propaganda?"
What saddens me is how deeply mired in this very thing a majority of Americans are without even realizing it. We have been duped into thinking it's only other countries who engage in this practice against their own people and yet here we are.
I'm also deeper into the mire of what the whole idea of what we consider "Indigenous" to be when I read about your connection to the landscape. Even AS an Indigenous person, the "connected to the land" bit is so much a part of the Native stereotype as anything else. There isn't some magic connectivity that happens to us just because we are Indians. If we don't exercise it, like anyone else, we become disconnected. It is a complex and frustrating issue.
Finally, that Mark Schoenfeld piece. I wish there was a bio attached to it, because there is a "Mark Schoenfeld" currently in the writing program at UM who I know is from Texas. I was paired to read with him a few weeks ago for their Second Wind series. He's a nice fellow, and I suspect it's the same person.
I think that's why the student asked the question about not having his thinking dictated, though I don't know which direction he was asking from (I wanted to say something about don't believe everything Sam Harris says but didn't want to assume I knew where he was coming from, since I didn't). The Master and Margarita is a wild book. It was an interesting entry point to that subject, especially since I haven't read it in years.
I kept trying to include something around the assumptions made about who's automatically connected to land or not -- like an instantaneous mind meld that comes through heritage? I sometimes wonder what people think that looks like -- but it felt like an entirely different essay, and probably not one I should be writing. I get worked up about multigenerational ranching families insisting that they've been good "stewards of the land" (that's always the phrase), but refusing to question how their family acquired it, much less the whole concept of private land ownership itself. Since I'm in the first generation of my Montana family to *not* be raised on the ranch, it feels constantly relevant.
"Complex and frustrating" is a good beginning.
Surely that's the same Mark Schoenfeld! What a coincidence. I wished for so much more in that piece, and wondered if his interviews had more but it was kept as a short one. Modern Huntsman's issues are enormous. They're like a book. But the quality is a bit hit and miss.
If you're a cattle rancher there is almost no way you are a good steward of the land since there have been few things more destructive to the land than cattle.
I wonder also about sheep. Sheep show up everywhere. The Highland Clearances in Scotland kicked people out to make room for sheep. What is it about sheep?
And yes. Most of them will argue otherwise, but yes.
Thank you, as always, Nia. Regarding the perseverance of the Jewish people in the midst of continual forced disconnection from particular geographic areas, I'm reminded of what the rabbi at our local congregation told me years ago: "we had to switch from sacred space to sacred time, e.g. shabbat and the holidays"
Thanks again for always catalyzing wonderful conversation.
That's a beautiful way to put it, "from sacred space to sacred time."
I had an indexing and proofreading job for a book on anti-Semitism years ago (from Facing History and Ourselves, an educational publisher: https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/convenient-hatred-history-antisemitism), and reading that history, especially of continual dislocation and eviction over two thousand years, was really hard to grapple with.
When I read this I was struck IMMEDIATELY by how narrow a view of another people will be without "human intelligence". There seems no subsititute for the work of human interview to extract what life in a place is really like. In my early career, much of the business of the company I worked at was analytics of what life was like in other places in the world. The angle was national defense but I don't think that is important. There is always a classic misunderstanding. Do the people want to be free? Do they know what free even means? Is everyday life so difficult, they lack the luxury to even consider? Love your writing. Hope you are using non-lead rounds.
Even when we know one another, we know so little about one another, don't we? Bring in even slightly different cultures or backgrounds and our ignorance is far greater than our knowledge. That interview with David Sloan speaks a bit to what you're talking about. He told a story about how difficult it is to change practices that one culture considers awful, but that the culture in question has longstanding reasons for continuing. Change can be imposed, but to be most effective it has to come from the inside. Not always easy.
(And yes, copper, thank you for asking about that. It's so important. A friend makes my ammo for me.)
This is an outstanding post, and I will savory it over the next few days.
I think it should be republished in any number of periodicals: Backcountry Journal, Field and Stream, Outside, NYT and WaPo, Atlantic, Orion - need I go on.
I loved this and looking forward to rereading it and your recommendations.
Goodness, that's a collection of big compliments -- thank you! I'm glad it spoke to you. It was a tough one to bring together. (And I really need to catch up on my Backcountry Journal and Orion reading!)
That paragraph is its own beautiful essay! I always love the chickadees, too. I've had a special affection for them for a long time, especially the ones that live near my house; seeing them in the woods often feels like running into a friend I'm always happy to see.
And what a wonderful thought, curiosity that could be a creed. I'm going to walk around with that one for a long time. Thank you. (Also, that piece on thinking about thinking got me a little tripped out. I'm not sure I'd want to track my own thinking as closely as he did!)
How refreshing this blending of a human approach to nature (your approach to hunting, after all it's not all about filling the freezer) and a glimpse simultaneously into the darker side of human unconsciousness. Totalitarianism is most insidious as it hides as in our beloved once indigenous location. Be well!
Your reflections on nature interspersed with with reflections on your grandparents, and exile, made me think about the differences between land, place and home. I have always admired the connection you have with your land; how bound up it is in how you live, and how beautifully you write about it. But these descriptions are so remote from my experience, as someone who has always lived in or close to large cities on the Northeast seaboard (and spent hardly any time in the woods as an adult). I must confess feeling little or no connection with land, anywhere.
But what I do feel some connection with is place and home. Just ask any New Yorker - you won't hear anything about the land, or the rivers, or the sky. They love the skyline, the neighborhoods, the people, the noise, the culture, the chaos. Even the parks are loved as city spaces first and foremost. As for me, even if I never move back to New Haven, I'll always feel love for my dysfunctional but vital little city. Springsteen's "My Hometown" and all that. You have sometimes written of your time in Moscow, and your associations with certain places there. My very early years were in Washington D.C., and even today, if I were driving in on I-95 I know I would get that odd homesick feeling in my stomach as soon as I glimpsed the big Mormon temple right off the Beltway.
Maybe these are trivial examples and I'm splitting hairs. But it does lead me to wonder how much it matters what kind of land, and place, or neighborhood, you grew up in. Did I mention this book by Quill Kukla? It looks really neat - different from what you write about but for some reason it made me think of your blog:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/city-living-9780190855369
Oh, I think there is a ton here! The Center for Humans and Nature (https://humansandnature.org) focuses a lot of their writing and energy on exactly the feelings of belonging and placemaking and nature in cities and their head editor (I think) published a book about the coyotes of Chicago, or one coyote (I haven't read it yet but Sarah Boon had a short interview with him about it for Undark: https://undark.org/2019/03/15/five-questions-for-gavin-van-horn/).
When I was researching my walking book, I came across a lot of studies about how the places we live, including architecture, shape our minds and mental health and outlook. There is a lot of interesting stuff on that.
In any case, I like that you've brought up the distinction I keep making, even if unintentionally, because land connection and place connection. Is there a difference? I feel deeply connected to the land I grew up in, but I don't think my friends who grew up in cities are necessarily any less connected to those places. Do you need to experience many nights sleeping under a quiet, starry sky to feel a sense of belonging and connection? I wouldn't necessarily say so. There might be an argument to be made about being able to connect to life on the planet, but there again, part of the whole point of the Center for Humans and Nature is to show how much of that life thrives in cities.
It was either my dad or my cousin who said once years ago that a person is always most connected to the kind of place they grew up in. I think it was my cousin, who like my father grew up in Leningrad. He disagreed with her because he feels most at home in Montana even though he didn't move here until he was in his 30s. But then we reminded him that he was born and spent his early years in a village in the Ural Mountains. Even though he mostly grew up in Leningrad, did that memory of mountains and trees and nature linger? Who knows.
I don't think they're trivial examples. It's these kinds of questions that help us reconnect to life in all its variations. I've lived in several cities both in the U.S. and overseas and have very visceral memories of all of them. Except for maybe Boston, I have a lot of fondness for them! Even as homesickness plagued me. But humans have resided in larger communities for millennia. Maybe what matters is how we shape them and what we connect to within them.
Do you know, I've only ever driven through New Haven, never stopped?
That book looks really interesting!
I do think there is a distinction between land and place, somehow - just maybe not one that is sharp or systematic, or always necessary. Kind of like humans and nature. Place to me usually implies culture, and civilization - people - along with nature, but it always started out as land (and will return to being land, once all the humans are gone).
Most people just drive through New Haven and never stop (except to check out Yale campus or go get the famous pizza - literally the only two things most people know about the city). Boston is actually the only other place I lived for any length of time besides New Haven, D.C. (and now, Ontario), and oddly enough I do have lots of visceral associations - but it's a weird, not-very-friendly place, so not surprising you wouldn't feel attached.
And by the way: I feel bad always dropping random readings - obviously I wouldn't expect you to read them all, it's just fun to share - but also meant to include this great Twitter thread I came across recently, which for obvious reasons immediately made me think of you:
https://twitter.com/Helenreflects/status/1589299078219067394
That is a fantastic thread! I printed it out and am getting that paper she references downloaded. Thank you! (Don't feel bad dropping random readings. They're always interesting!)
I didn't like Boston at all, for a number of reasons, mostly because as you put it, it's a weird, not-very-friendly place. Also the coffee is terrible ;)
I lived for 12 years in barely-upstate New York, and when we moved there I was finishing grad school in Boston, so spent a year driving back and forth through Connecticut every week. Which is, I have to say, a much prettier state than I ever imagined while I was growing up in Montana. But I only went the longer route that took me through New Haven a couple of times.
I think your observation that "place usually implies culture" is a key to the question. My instinct is always that connection to land requires fewer human creations around, but I want to try to push against that a lot, because it seems to imply that other types of connections are degraded or lesser somewhere, and I don't think that's true. But It's something I'm going to have to think about a LOT more.
You may have already read this piece along with the New Yorker article, but just in case it escaped you.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/us/mississippi-river-drought.html?unlocked_article_code=3Vr1Ksd4SBVvkOh1Z0mW1jGZcaEAPmDRy49PD87j-JpbH5t9Q51-Mef-Mo6rtIrerx1-JhVEPOrdeFJI-tn9tBe2Ml4a0M5eWtIL2bbGSOiNiqKIN9YN0ah9l8mTvyjuHCTa06wYjo9nmaqiaA-FGy-SejBpo_o2VjaRizZlh0c6xfyKPdMdFEpVaVZsbnIwSrzCm-UYhzSOUefITTJH3R9YUJGEh7OcFtQ5aLQeEsQSg2uIzgSXBOA_2yrI7aPcqQ20s2Qb466jGNXzYt6FilZN5OgjXvNh5ARhPjQ9Gr-RqAgMciQF4S5ER5Z-ngR7H9zunmstfMTmliXYJA&smid=share-url
Somehow I missed this comment. Hadn't seen that piece but I think I came across a couple of tweets with the photos. Incredible. There is so much going on around us ecologically that should be in the top of the news all the time.
This is such a beautiful read, I've enjoyed re-reading and thinking about it the past couple of days. I too have hunted and appreciate the immersion, the attention to the land, the surroundings, the animals, that deep knowledge that comes with it as a feeling more than anything articulate. I love that you wrote about that--and you also write so eloquently about how it relates to our sense of identity, our connections to land, to histories both foreign and local, familial and global. The nuance in all of it is what makes it both hard and filled with longing--that desire for connection to place, to allow place to mean something to us. I think about that so much having moved to Alaska a bit reluctantly and coming to find I love it but that it took twenty years--and part of that was having the ability to come to love it on terms I could recognize and find myself in, and I wonder about that too. As a settler I'm complicit in a history of colonization, and I still question what right or connection I have to call this place home. My settler ancestors lived in Oregon, but they were not Indigenous to that land, and I resent the rancher/settler multi-generation claims so many in Oregon and other places make to a place. But I also loved Oregon and felt a homesickness for it for years and still do. And yet there is conflict in that homesickness too. And I think that's right because it shouldn't be easy but I feel so strongly that we should know the history and natural history and culture of the places we live, that we should feel connection to the places we live in. We ignore place the same way we ignore the relationships we build outside of family. We allow society too often to tell us the rules of the game and we follow to our--and the land's--detriment. We need to pay attention. Really loved reading this.
Thank you so much for all of this, Freya. These are such thoughtful, in-depth responses that resonate a lot with me. This especially: “to allow place to mean something to us.” I can think of so many who would chafe at this but it feels like not a bad thing to take a deep pause, maybe for years, and sink into the import of that and the questions behind it. Humans are wanderers of the earth but also linked to place and ecosystem. All of that holds so much more potential for every one of us than the past few centuries have allowed.
I admire how you’ve struggled to connect to a land you didn’t love. I lived in upstate New York for 12 years (the other 8 years were in cities, there’s another topic!) and kept trying to coax myself into loving it but it never happened. Sometimes light would slant through the fields in a way that evoked a sense of home, and I loved the ubiquitous red-winged blackbirds standing on cattails and there was one stream-river I liked to visit. But I never managed to feel anything stronger for the place than acceptance and far too much of the time it was simply resignation. For you to have worked through to another side of that is really admirable to me.
This feels like an ongoing conversation I’d love to keep having with other people contemplating what it all means, and learning to care for places. Or be cared for in return.
This is such a great piece Nia that I feel like I could write an entire essay in response to it. I so admire your deep thinking and how you can coherently organize so many cogent thoughts. It is impressive.
This: "What does it mean to have freedom of mind, to not have your thinking and worldview shaped by propaganda?"
What saddens me is how deeply mired in this very thing a majority of Americans are without even realizing it. We have been duped into thinking it's only other countries who engage in this practice against their own people and yet here we are.
I'm also deeper into the mire of what the whole idea of what we consider "Indigenous" to be when I read about your connection to the landscape. Even AS an Indigenous person, the "connected to the land" bit is so much a part of the Native stereotype as anything else. There isn't some magic connectivity that happens to us just because we are Indians. If we don't exercise it, like anyone else, we become disconnected. It is a complex and frustrating issue.
Finally, that Mark Schoenfeld piece. I wish there was a bio attached to it, because there is a "Mark Schoenfeld" currently in the writing program at UM who I know is from Texas. I was paired to read with him a few weeks ago for their Second Wind series. He's a nice fellow, and I suspect it's the same person.
Also your own entire essay would be an incredible read :)
😬
I think that's why the student asked the question about not having his thinking dictated, though I don't know which direction he was asking from (I wanted to say something about don't believe everything Sam Harris says but didn't want to assume I knew where he was coming from, since I didn't). The Master and Margarita is a wild book. It was an interesting entry point to that subject, especially since I haven't read it in years.
I kept trying to include something around the assumptions made about who's automatically connected to land or not -- like an instantaneous mind meld that comes through heritage? I sometimes wonder what people think that looks like -- but it felt like an entirely different essay, and probably not one I should be writing. I get worked up about multigenerational ranching families insisting that they've been good "stewards of the land" (that's always the phrase), but refusing to question how their family acquired it, much less the whole concept of private land ownership itself. Since I'm in the first generation of my Montana family to *not* be raised on the ranch, it feels constantly relevant.
"Complex and frustrating" is a good beginning.
Surely that's the same Mark Schoenfeld! What a coincidence. I wished for so much more in that piece, and wondered if his interviews had more but it was kept as a short one. Modern Huntsman's issues are enormous. They're like a book. But the quality is a bit hit and miss.
If you're a cattle rancher there is almost no way you are a good steward of the land since there have been few things more destructive to the land than cattle.
I wonder also about sheep. Sheep show up everywhere. The Highland Clearances in Scotland kicked people out to make room for sheep. What is it about sheep?
And yes. Most of them will argue otherwise, but yes.
Thank you, as always, Nia. Regarding the perseverance of the Jewish people in the midst of continual forced disconnection from particular geographic areas, I'm reminded of what the rabbi at our local congregation told me years ago: "we had to switch from sacred space to sacred time, e.g. shabbat and the holidays"
Thanks again for always catalyzing wonderful conversation.
That's a beautiful way to put it, "from sacred space to sacred time."
I had an indexing and proofreading job for a book on anti-Semitism years ago (from Facing History and Ourselves, an educational publisher: https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/convenient-hatred-history-antisemitism), and reading that history, especially of continual dislocation and eviction over two thousand years, was really hard to grapple with.
When I read this I was struck IMMEDIATELY by how narrow a view of another people will be without "human intelligence". There seems no subsititute for the work of human interview to extract what life in a place is really like. In my early career, much of the business of the company I worked at was analytics of what life was like in other places in the world. The angle was national defense but I don't think that is important. There is always a classic misunderstanding. Do the people want to be free? Do they know what free even means? Is everyday life so difficult, they lack the luxury to even consider? Love your writing. Hope you are using non-lead rounds.
Even when we know one another, we know so little about one another, don't we? Bring in even slightly different cultures or backgrounds and our ignorance is far greater than our knowledge. That interview with David Sloan speaks a bit to what you're talking about. He told a story about how difficult it is to change practices that one culture considers awful, but that the culture in question has longstanding reasons for continuing. Change can be imposed, but to be most effective it has to come from the inside. Not always easy.
(And yes, copper, thank you for asking about that. It's so important. A friend makes my ammo for me.)
This is an outstanding post, and I will savory it over the next few days.
I think it should be republished in any number of periodicals: Backcountry Journal, Field and Stream, Outside, NYT and WaPo, Atlantic, Orion - need I go on.
I loved this and looking forward to rereading it and your recommendations.
You knocked it out of the park with this one.
Thank you
Goodness, that's a collection of big compliments -- thank you! I'm glad it spoke to you. It was a tough one to bring together. (And I really need to catch up on my Backcountry Journal and Orion reading!)
That paragraph is its own beautiful essay! I always love the chickadees, too. I've had a special affection for them for a long time, especially the ones that live near my house; seeing them in the woods often feels like running into a friend I'm always happy to see.
And what a wonderful thought, curiosity that could be a creed. I'm going to walk around with that one for a long time. Thank you. (Also, that piece on thinking about thinking got me a little tripped out. I'm not sure I'd want to track my own thinking as closely as he did!)