I've been heading upstate nearly every weekend for the past couple months. It started last spring and has continued more and more frequently as time went on.
I'm officially hooked! As a born and bred New Yorker, "The Country" was something that took me a while to appreciate. When I was seven and visited an uncle in Middletown, it was drowsy carsickness. In high school it was the boondocks. In college it was hunters and God-fearing people that ate instant potatoes, or else batshit hippies in tie-dyed shirts who never showered and lived in the past. Isn't it weird how the same things can be so different to one person depending on what phase of your life you're in?
I don't know what to call this phase of my life since, like most people, it won't make sense to me until years later. Maybe like, the "something's changing but I don't know for what end or how to get there" phase. I quit my full time job and took my career into my own hands – but for how long? And what's next? It's not possible for me to worry about it right now. I'm not married and although in a committed relationship do not plan for marriage or for kids – but is that sustainable? I physically can't think about it now, I'm busy looking at this frog on this lily pad. It could be the meditation, or the ayahuasca, or the various disappointments or humiliations suffered in every other aspect of normal social life, but I hit a point where I realized I could take all of these and sort of shelve them while I go look at woodpeckers for an hour and by the time the woodpeckers go to bed, nothing else really seems to matter anymore.
One thing I can't get over, as a city mouse, is just how soft everything looks. In my head, I completely understand that if I ran into a wooded area I would get scratched left and right by twigs, maybe stung by some kinds of unfriendly insects, or impaled on a split branch. But when I just look at trees they look soft and fluffy and comfortable. It's a completely different visual experience than living in a city where everything is made of brick and concrete and steel, and what you see feels impossible to compromise with. You work around them. In the country, you can walk slowly and the leaves won't bite. Someone should study this.
