pitch a tent in the woods and leave me there for a week and i’ll immediately become a completely different person. stripping myself of banal routine and obligation somehow gives me as much purpose as it does freedom, however fleeting. today i walked barefoot along the shoreline and sifted through the sand for rocks, and i plucked out the ones that reminded me of each of my friends and kept them in my front pocket.

what a powerful task that is. to peer through mother nature’s lens, to know the beauty in these little chunks of her creation. to marvel at their every groove, every inflection, every glimmering trace of imperfection; how a certain colourful splotch can so closely resemble the splashes of blue in a familiar pair of eyes. the deep burgundy of a friend’s knitted sweater, the wispy gold of another’s hair, the twinkling splatter of a cloudless midnight sky. and how clear it is to see from the rocks on the ground that our lives are nothing but a mirror pointed back at the earth, that our selves are nothing but recycled bits and pieces of the planet we stomp so mercilessly upon. how healing it is to crouch so close to the lake's edge and dig your toes into the muck, and let the gentle undertow pull you deeper into the ground beneath, anchoring you as you become one with the shore. i revelled in the lakewater washing over the tops of my feet, even as a dead minnow bobbed about at my ankles, floating lifelessly atop the tide’s crest. i buried it neatly in the sand and kept walking.

it’s easy to let life happen to me out here, like i’ve always lived like this. it’s easy to convene with the universe. to beg the stars for wishes and the moon for answers and to stare at my own reflection on the lake’s glassy surface and plead for knowledge i know i’ll never have. i like it too much. i want to be a rock collector forever. a forest dweller. a flower smeller, a bug befriender, a tree hugger. i want hills instead of buildings and rivers instead of streets and fish and grass and leaves and bees, and i want to fill my pockets with pieces of the earth until they pierce holes through the fabric and burst out the bottom.