We spend our days hiking, canoeing, reading, lolling in the river. Or glomming eagles as they work the updrafts, or watching distinct greens mute into late summer's single dull shade before autumn's color-burst. Wind soughing in the pines and hemlocks is our surf.
Our theme is together (yes, there's the cliched maxim -- we may not have everything together, but together we have everything). We try to become the people our dogs think we are.
Halfway through each brilliant, breath-catching morning we inwardly exclaim, Hey, more days like this one! And at night, under a star-splashed sky, we ask Big Questions such as: Was that a beaver smacking the water with his tail? and Were those coyotes? and Did you hear the owls and the whippoorwills? and Is that Sagittarius or Cassiopeia?
OTHERS have described living in nature with particular insight....
Primate researcher Jane Goodall: "I get (a) deep satisfaction when I am alone in the forest, in the dim green and brown world beneath the great trees. A sense of timelessness....Lying under a great tree, looking up at the tiny stars whose light shines down through the rustling leaves, or lying on the beach and gazing up at the moon, puts everything in perspective, gives meaning to my life."
The great Crowfoot hunter, Blackfoot: "What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."
Robert Traver, the noted Upper Michigan novelist ("Anatomy of a Murder") and teller of fishing and woodland yarns: "I fish because...I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly. Because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties, and assorted social posturing I thus escape. Because in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing what they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion. Because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed, or impressed by power...Because only in the woods can I find solitude without loneliness. (And) because I suspect that men are going this way for the last time, and I for one don't want to waste the trip..."
Thoreau, who wrote the book on going to the woods, said he went there "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach -- and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
What the wilderness forest has to teach, we re-learn during each sojourn there, are the broader dimensions only nature can provide: humility, simplicity, and rededication to the eternal verities. Oh, and the fortifying reassurance that there will be no deathbed lament about wishing one had spent more time in a city.