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In an essay published in Slate on her experiences of grieving in nature, she writes, ‘Having my sense of smallness reflected back at me - having the geography mimic the puzzlement I carry within - made me feel more at home in a majesty outside of my comprehension. “Meghan O’Rourke, New York based writer and memoirist, lost her mother younger than most and writes openly about bereavement. So when I came across this in Latona’s essay, I wanted to share it: Dad, Highland Hammock State Park, Sebring, Florida, Feb. Neither of my parents was a caretaker (and I am not) but my father consistently modeled hiking, beach walking, and being in the woods as a way to live, a way to heal. Being surrounded by the sights, sounds, smells, and/or tactile elements of natural places, the natural world - trees, plants, fungi and ferns, shells, wild animals (even insects, fish), rain, snow, ponds, rivers, brooks, mountains, oceans, marshes, bogs, sand, wind, sun, moon - and walking in those places, usually alone, seems to comfort me and enlarge my soul in a way that nothing else will.
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I’d replied that I don’t feel the emptiness he describes but I have had significant losses in my life, and when I am grieving, feeling small and sad, feeling misunderstood, etc., my comfort urge is to get outside - on the beach, in the woods, in a park or garden. community, perhaps just part and parcel of mortal existence - and how it’s often assuaged (temporarily) by addictions to sex, drugs, power, wealth, status seeking and status symbols, shopping and buying material goods, and also by care-taking to feel needed and valuable. The first was Wild: the Healing Relationship Between Nature and Grief, by Freya Latona and Daniel Shipp, particularly as I’d just been commenting on a friend’s Facebook post about the emptiness many people feel inside - from loss, suffering, perhaps a focus on individuality vs. Two essays in this issue caught my attention. Each issue, almost 50 so far, has a theme (e.g., Revolution, Fear, Play, Ephemeral, Feast, Pattern, Desire, Decay) and this issue’s theme is Wild. I love this Australian digital publication, The Planthunter. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.” ― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. “Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled.