Into the Woods
Into the Woods
May 16, 2008
Again my dog and I go out into the woods; me to escape my job working in a basement office cubicle under fluorescent lights behind a computer screen; my dog to escape the confines of being a domesticated house dog. We go to the woods seeking the wild.
It's a perfect day to be in the woods. It's spring time, Mid-May, 70 degrees. Any day is a perfect day to be out into the wild woods, unless you are already too civilized and domesticated. If that is the case then you will almost always find the woods too hot or too cold, too humid, or too many mosquitoes, ticks or deer flies, too many thorns, nettles, poison ivy or poison oak, too dark, too quiet, too lonely, too boring, or too many wild animals waiting and wanting to eat you.
Nature is alive and glowing with vibrant, radiating greens. This is the time of year that you can actually see plants grow from day to day, hour to hour, and minute to minute. Flowers are blooming everywhere. Their scent floats on the air calling to the bees. Birds are busy building nests. Ants are busing building sand castles. Frogs can be heard singing love songs, hoping to find a mate. Nature did not die this past fall and winter. Most of nature simply fell asleep, hibernating through the cold and dark days until the warmth and light of spring time returned.
My dog and I wander through the woods; alive and awake to nature. My dog remembers instinctively, better than I do. Some of the time he is on the hunt looking for food. I know I have food at home in my cupboards, refrigerator, and freezer. My ancestors gave up serious hunting and gathering long ago, 10,000 years ago to be exact, to take up farming. Fifty years ago my family forgot farming to live the city life. I'm here today in the woods with my digital camera, hunting for pictures to make a movie with. I am now a modern man, living in a world of images - in books, magazines, newspapers, on TV, in the movies, and on the computer. I live in a world of constantly changing images, a world of abstractions removed from what is really real. There is something within me however that still remembers nature, that still responds to nature particularly in springtime.
There still remains within me a connection to nature, a love of nature. I feel an urgency these days to return to nature as often as I can to experience the reality of nature and now to take pictures of nature. For most of the modern world, myself included, nature seems to be dead. We modern humans are hibernating in our cubical caves far removed from nature. Consequently, nature is rapidly disappearing in danger of becoming extinct!
I fear that soon, all that will remain of nature and the wild will be just an image; only a photograph or a film of something that existed once upon a time, long ago.