Nature

Sometimes I feel like it's almost necessary to get out of nature -- spend some time in a primarily urban environment -- to be able to appreciate how necessary it is to our peace of mind, and also to be able to appreciate the bits of nature that filter in to that urban setting and change our perceptions of the natural and the urban at the same time. Perhaps this idea is what creates for me a disconnect in my reading of Emerson and Thoreau. I love nature. Having spent a fairly ridiculous amount of my life in a tent on the back side of some mountain watching the rain wash away what's left of the evening's campfire, listening to the water hum to itself as it filters through the canopy of trees, I feel like there's a part of me that is insepparable from it. some of my favorite memories, often the images that I remember best and most clearly, are lakes and rivers in Glacier park and the way the sun strikes the water trickling down the sides of Going to the Sun road as the snow begins to melt.

The city, for me, makes these images so much more poignant. There's almost nothing like catching the till of birdsong in a break in traffic, noting the roots of trees pushing and prying at cracks in sidewalks, or watching the first snow fall and blanket the ground, covering everything in a coccoon of white and making it all, in some way, equal. These things, in nature, are not extraordinary. The closeness of society and the contrasts between civilization and the wilderness seem more important to me than simply immersing oneself in on or the other. Their connotations are more powerful when they are juxtaposed one with the other. While I've often wished to lose myself for months in the backwoods of Montana, I suspect those woods would take on the tenors of civilization for me, simply because I've been so steeped in them myself, and carry those ideas and expectations wrapped around my shoulders wherever I go, whether I'm in the city or not. That is to say, I feel that if I were to attempt exist for a time solely in the nature that I love, I already carry too much of what I want to leave behind with me to fully be able to experience that solitude. It is better for me, then, to more or less accept what's here and appreciate it more fully in the knowledge that the two -- the city and the wilderness -- somehow or another coexist.

It seems like this concept is a great deal more Emersonian than it seems on the surface. Emerson understands the need for man to seclude himself, to reach a sort of communion with nature in order to understand his own nature, but he also seems to understand the impossibility of such an ideal existence. Even Thoreau's experience suggests that distancing oneself from society in such an ideal way is difficult, if not impossible. Understanding this dichotomy may allow us to experience life to the fullest.