Water; its movement, shape, sound, color and the creative and transformative way it reflects light and clouds and trees.
Trees -- and their endless variation, their shadows, their slow dance to a rhythm we can't feel, the size and shape and color of their leaves in all seasons. I am forever fascinated by their "personalities" which, I know, makes no sense. Trees aren't people, but I am convinced of their sentience. Just because we don't understand the language doesn't mean something isn't being communicated. I could (maybe I do) spend a lot of time wondering what it is that trees are expressing, which reminds me of a quote I read earlier this week from former Guardian columnist A.C. Grayling, "If you really want a mind-altering experience, look at a tree." It stays with me.
Birds. Birds and their access to the sky, the knowing messengers that call out the secrets of other worlds from treetops, the littles that chip from overgrown fence rows, and the raptors and scavengers that drift in the thermals and sweep the ground below with their ghostly shadows.
Escape and freedom -- tied to all of my modest adventures. I like, can't get enough of, being away, down the road or the trail. I don't mind, often prefer, to travel solo. I'm addicted to the body in motion, the mind alone in a place to freely consider only things that have their own natural consequences. (Beware though, sometimes the body will go one way whilst the mind travels in another, and at some point, neither may have the slightest clue where they are.)
Given time and circumstance, some other thoughts that are of little consequence to my day to day and thus far superior to it:
What the French call "l'appel du vide" (19 more "awesome" words for things that don't translate in English here) which literally, and very poetically, translates into (and I love this) "the call of the void" but it specifically refers to the urge to jump from very high places. I am not afraid of heights. I am, in fact enamoured of them (as long as I can feel my weight balanced evenly over my two feet that are planted firmly on the ground, amen). It is wildly exhilarating to stand at the edge of cliffs and feel my breath catch in the back of my throat -- and while I have no desire to jump, the imagination is so powerful that I can almost feel that moment when ... (speaking of things that have only natural consequences)
Also:
1. The way the morning sunlight, as it shines through the damp haze rising from the gorge below, causes the hemlocks to appear as if they were part of an overexposed photograph
2. The inescapable sound of so much water in motion
3. The way the word "watershed" captures my imagination and emotions and feels like it belongs somewhere in the middle of clouds, a spring river, and a sigh
4. Micro climatology
5. The aesthetics and engineering of state forest trails (never mind stupid gas pipeline trails)
6. The also "wildly exhilarating" feeling of being lost (in a maze of stupid gas pipeline trails, map? huh?) ... that is only fully realized after one has found one's way
7. The way the woods sometimes smells perversely like the stuff my step dad used to spray into the eaves of the milk house to eradicate the wasp metropolises
8. An emerging treatise on the nature of all kinds of hunger
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