Thoreau-ish thoughts formed while escaping a family reunion...

It's reassuring to know that there are places like this everywhere, because nature is literally everywhere.

We lock ourselves in human nature, lose the key, and forget there's a back door. Through it there are grasses that tickle your feet like spreading laughter and a pond carrying the locked-in magic of the universe when it forms ripples as though caused by rain, but there's only the suggestion of precipitation in the sky's stoic face. (I'm sure it would win a game of poker, that sky).

I can hear a bird whose name I'll never know chirping, and the tall ferns grate and grace each other like the shuffling of cards. Cars wheeze down a highway I can't see---it's been swallowed by the trees like an artist's paint splotches on thin crooked limbs.

That I connect what I perceive to their artificial parodies saddens me, but I guess I have to use what I know to describe what I don't---and I know products, I know consumerism, I know people.

I don't know how the wind makes ripples like slackened cellophane or the local fauna or how to tell which trees are simply dying or already dead and why either situation is the case.

Nature has no assembly instructions, manuals, or guides (at least from a respectable source). It still has a process, a story, a past, a present, and a future. We don't respect that.