Some people get lost in the woods. Me, I find myself in it. I do my best thinking when I collaborate with the trees, for they never fail to remind me of the natural, honest aspects of existence.


You see, life’s problems are like broken-apart lego castles - the products of one of my favorite childhood toys. You want to repair them, but you don’t know how, unless you read the directions and use your own faulty, but mostly reliable, logic. Most often, that will be enough to repair the castle, unless the castle is one of those 100,000-piece Master Builder sets that demand much intelligence, experience and perseverance.


Now, imagine if someone lost the directions. How in the world are you going to be able to assemble every little one-square-inch brick into its correct place? The truth is, you can’t. Without knowing the steps to solve a problem, you can’t arrive at any sort of reasonable answer.

In all of mankind’s building and imagining, debating and creating, destroying and exploiting, much of the human race has lost touch with the planet that gave rise to it. This is similar to growing up and forgetting who one’s parents are. How can you explain yourself if you cannot explain where you came from? Mother Earth was the original teacher, for she existed before humans, and she will continue to exist long after we are gone, unless we destroy her in our carelessness. What a terrible thing that would be! The Earth is too great a gift to destroy. On our planet, we have so many reasons to wonder. I always wonder how, in a forest, you see groups of trees that are twenty times as tall as you are stretching on for miles! It seems like magic, but there is nothing fictional about it. All those trees have reasons for being what they are. Those reasons, along with the rules for living in the most natural, benevolent, way, exist right here on Earth. Those reasons, so instrumental in solving our problems, are hiding among the trees waiting to be found.

Humans have such a capacity to do as we please. We make tons of decisions. As a result, we end up doing new stuff, old stuff, stuff that comes naturally, stuff we contrive, stuff that nobody thought was possible (for better or worse), and stuff that never should have been done. With willpower like that, we just might ruin the earth - or maybe we will save it. We can choose to take steps to bettering ourselves and the rest of the world by striving to learn as much as we can. That takes some serious mental (and sometimes physical) energy. It also takes a little innate talent. Just like building the huge Lego castle.

I know that I am helping myself out by walking in the woods. I am spending time with all kinds of living things and learning new stuff about life. And that’s pretty refreshing. Don’t believe me? Take a walk in the woods. Get to know it a little better, and you will probably be surprised by what it has to share.