I’ve logged more experience than most with simplicity and the complexity you discover inside simplicity, minimalism and asocial behavior, endurance and landscape.
Here is the truth: I think some deep wisdom inside me (a) sensed the stress, (b) was terrified for me, and (c) gave me something new and hard to focus on in order to prevent me from lapsing into a despair coma — and also to keep me from having a jelly jar of wine in my hand.
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Kathleen Dean Moore is the author of The Pine Island Paradox (Milkweed Editions), Riverwalking (Harcourt), and Holdfast (Lyons Press). She is a distinguished professor of philosophy at Oregon State University, where she directs the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word.
I drifted in my kayak, listening for small sloshes and hushed voices behind me: the sounds of my college students launching their boats in the dark. The night was intensely quiet and dark, like a campsite after the fire goes cold, but the moon was preparing to rise over the mountains in the east, and the lake showed a slick of silver.