For Lack of a Better World

We went for a hike in Rotary Park today and and though there was some trail that was bordered and filled with aggregate, most of the park trails were natural. What wasn’t exposed soil and mud was dead and decaying leaves, slick from the recent precipitation.

It’s been so long since I’ve spent a substantial amount of time in Clarksville; enough to reacquaint myself with the land that is. I’ve forgotten how wet and damp it can be.

It’s comforting though to see that so much of the land is as I remember it, as I experienced it living here in my youth, untamed and left to the natural cycles of the seasons. I wish I knew how long it would stay like this, how long the terrain would remained relatively untouched and to the whims of nature. It’s always slightly dreadful to return to someplace familiar to see that it has been paved and urbanized.

The park where Luna and I explored today was quintessential Middle Tennessee with rolling hills, exposed limestone, and naked trees reaching up into a crisp winter sky. The forest floor was a carpet of brown leaves, the only variance in hue coming from the amber light of the afternoon sun fracturing through the trees. You could smell the mud beneath your feet and the decay of the plant life around you.

We followed the creek from the parking lot and up through the hills. Most of the park was a frisbee golf course. There were occasional cement platforms, presumably for ‘teeing off’ but beyond that it was just trees and leaves and ferns and exposed rock, a couple of smaller streams of water following predictable paths down their respective beds to the larger creek at the bottom of the valley.

These landscapes always feel like home. Not to me exclusively as a denizen per se, but home to me as a member of the species that inhabits these places. And I’m always at relative peace whenever I find myself in places like these. I was thinking today how curious and at the same time obvious it is that these are the places where we seek refuge from the industrialized world; places where the path is less obvious and the footing is a little less sure, where we are met with nature, however calm or docile it might be, and reminded of our place within creation.

I can’t help but think that we are still at home here. For as long as we have been away, we have never really left this place – the natural world. And it has certainly not left us. And despite how little my prayers may yield, I find myself praying that we find our way back home before we become permanently disconnected from this, our home.

The end.