Sunday Letter: In the Company of Trees
We moved to the woods, while our house in town is being built. Surrounded by forested wetlands, it feels as though we are living in a treehouse in this feast for the senses. Limbs and trunks blanketed by thick mosses capture your attention in a way few other things can. The ambient sounds of rain, sleet, and snow falling on the skylight replace the birdsong of Texas.
The first weeks in this soft, lush forest, revealed few human interactions and even less animal ones. Tracks in the snow are the only sign that they are here. The charming vacation home is a reader’s house. Handmade shelves hold hundreds of books on nature and the environment, food and climate, and poetry and prose from writers of the Pacific Northwest.
A friend once asked me how we get our kids outside, and my answer was to go with them, but this week in our nine acres of forest, I can see the effects of all of those park visits and camping trips as they bundle up and head outside together for hours on end.
We didn’t remove technology from their lives. We added nature.
Where does the new year find you?
Be well,
Kathy
Sharing book from our borrowed treehouse:
About Moss Lit: Moss is a literary journal of writing from the Pacific Northwest. Published annually, Moss is dedicated to exploring the intersection of place and creative expression, while exposing the region’s outstanding writers to a broad audience of readers, critics, and publishers. Since its debut issue in the summer of 2014, Moss has received praise for its sharp design, strong editorial hand, and its commitment to supporting new and emerging writers. Learn more
Kathy Donchak
When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent. ~MENG TZU (MENCIUS), fourth century BCE1, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg...
What do you do for living? We spend so much of our adult lives defining ourselves by the way we exist in the material world that we can easily mistake survival for living. So, I ask you, dear friends, what do you do for living? What is essential to your life to be one well-lived? For me: family, bird song, and a garden to share with friends will do nicely. Be well, Kathy