Beneath the Cottonwood 2

~thebogboys

##BENEATH THE COTTONWOOD 2

Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

R.W. Emerson exposed a tender core of my being with these words. All of the greatest walks in my life were either in total solitude, or they were in the company of those I felt enough trust towards to be able to become that eye-ball with, and in my life I've only ever accompanied one man with such a perspective. It is perhaps one of the rarest and yet most valuable insights to be able to shed one's ego and to disappear into the environment one occupies. It is the sensation of becoming a dumb animal again, to put down language, and society, and rules of engagement; it is to take out the middleman of process that creates a barrier between the soul (if such a thing exists) and reality. We all have biases, and most of us are not blessed enough to be aware of them, and thus they mutely meddle and influence our thoughts, emotions, desires; it is as if we are all mere puppets, slaves to our so-called "natures" (the culmination of experience and genetics that creates the civil man) and incapable of connecting with the heart of our true NATURE (the animalistic core of our being).

I made it to camp. After setting up my hammock beneath two shingle oaks, I assess my surroundings. A massive pile of dead honeysuckle bushes sits to the east of my hammock, created by my friend and I over several visits to this land. We had to fight for every foot of walkable earth that stretches around me. A drunken path ambles north to the waterline, then cuts east to a destination I had set when I first laid eyes upon this then-future campsite. Countless plants greet me here, neighbors and close friends, fellow beings in their own right. Horse-gentian, Allegheny blackberry, Canada clearweed, swamp and multiflora rose, germander, pokeweed. The great woody plants, too, join in the festivities: oaks and maples, sassafras, hickories, ashes all fill in the space above me, and their bark is also colored in with the foliage of the graceful greenbriers and carrionflowers, the poison ivies and the virgincreepers.

I remove my boots and my socks. I place my bare soles tenderly upon the earth. The ground is temperate in the cool early-fall air. The sand is mildly damp from the water table seeping up. The floor of that lazy northerly path is carpeted in dewberry, almost too thick to see the sandy bottom. The dewberry itself is a valuable pioneering species in this forest, quickly overtaking the bare earth exposed by our excavation of the invasive honeysuckle, protecting the soil from rapid erosion and providing a place for successional species to germinate over the coming years. When one looks at dewberry canes up close, the tiny, filamenterous brambles can be seen and felt with the fingers, and yet when the plants grow in abundance, the feet do not feel these needles. It is as if the forest is thanking me for my service. I look westward and see a tall white oak, standing guard over the perimeter of the wetland, and I make plans to clear a path to it.

-=-.o._.o.-=-‾-=-.o._.o.-=-

evan@thebogboys.space

> The sun shines only on the eyes of man but through to the
> heart of a child, eh? This cottonwood in particular was
> magnificent, but there are plenty of great ones in the
> area, too. This guy is a monster, visible from pretty far
> away even in the dense forest.

> I've found some of my favorite head slaps come from macro
> photography. Wait, you mean that little anonymous green
> schmear on the ground is actually a complex flower??

> Boy, you're describing Lake Michigan a bit too uncannily
> to be a coincidence. The human vagrants, the extravagant
> (extravagrant?) yuppies stealing the shoreline. I'm a
> Hoosier myself, and the Lake is always a great place to
> explore and get a little lost.

> There's a great book, *Beside Lake Beautiful* by William
> Quayle (1914), and while he coyly refrains from naming
> which Great Lake he stayed upon for his memoir, the way
> he described it was so easily Michigan, it couldn't have
> been elsewhere.

> I've seen Lake Huron, too, and while it is also a fantastic
> place, it has a completely different energy to Michigan. I
> hope next year to see Superior, it's just a pretty big
> drive for me!