A deep breath. Another one. Let the cooler air of the shaded understory inflate my lungs to their point of maximum elasticity. Let it out slowly, warmed and chemically transmuted by its moments within the miraculous feat of evolutionary engineering I call “my” body.
I begin, habitually, to translate the sense information received from the inhalation into words, to piece apart the smells (dead leaves, sweet earth, the marshy funk of riparian low tide rising on the breeze) from the experience of smell itself. Then I stop where I am, self-conscious, to put my hand to my heart and try again: One deep breath. Another one.
I’m here to make my loop—the quick one. I know many foragers who range deep and far and often into new terrain, seeking out a forest’s secrets with the spirit of an explorer. I’ve come to accept that I’m not one of them.
Perhaps it’s an overly elaborate excuse for having no internal sense of direction whatsoever, but I tend to take a more Stoic view on exploration and travel. If the highest goal of adventuring into the unknown isn’t just the fleeting high of novelty, but rather to send that questing tap root we call curiosity back into the world…then where is that spirit really more needed than at home? Who needs us to witness them with fresh eyes and a receptive mind more than our own family, than the land, than the more-than-human community we live our day-to-day existence within?
For these and other reasons—namely, long habit that has morphed into devotion—the vast majority of my time in the woods is spent at two or three parks, and out of those mostly the one a quick 5 minute drive from my house. The days, stretching recently to weeks, when I claim to not have time for this moment—not of solitude, really, but of reintegration into a whole—tend to be the times I most require it. I know this, and yet...
Read the rest at The Oyster Log, and look for mushroom walks with Chris on our calendar.
