My world

The relationship I have with trees. rocks and grass around my home is one that is hard to define. To me, "home" is a term that is created through fleeting emotion and moments frozen in my brain. For instance, I can look at the Oak tree in my backyard and clearly remember the time my parents brought my dog home for the first time. I looked at the tree that day, and in my mind, it's image will forever be associated with a happy moment in which I made a friend. Another time, when my girlfriend and I had first met, we took a hike through the woods near my home. It was a long walk, maybe three hours. It began to rain about an hour in, and gradually, we became lost. I remember the exact point in the path we were on when she told me she was leaving to go to school in Arizona. For a moment, I was sad, then happy, then sad...but I walked it out. Being lost was what I needed that day, and helped me to forget about the looming departure in our near future. Things eventually worked out, and that trail now represents a turning point in my life. It was a character altering moment, a time (maybe the first time) when I truly put another human's needs ahead of my own. Every tree, rock and blade of grass on that trail reminds me of that. I feel at home in such spaces of memory, in forests that represent personal growth and in fields of tragedy. Every branch and creek represents a thought I have had. To me, it seems that Thoreau felt many of the same spiritual/emotional connections to the natural world, to an even greater degree, perhaps. These pieces of the natural world are essential to my own personal history, and without them, I am lost. When I lived in Arizona for a year, the desert didn't speak to me as did the trees and grass. Nothing seemed to feel right without them. So I moved back to Ohio. Thoreau seems to have built his personal philosophy and mythology out of the natural habitat surrounding him. I have done the same thing, albeit, in a modernized way. It is harder for me to become lost in the woods. Some days, when I really need to think, I drive the desolate country roads, listening to the wind, and sometimes music. I feel like Thoreau might have done the same if he were alive today,well, if he could afford the gas. There are new factors for me to consider in my relationship to nature that Thoreau didn't have to deal with. I'm sure there was plenty he had to be conscious of that I wouldn't give a second thought to. Countless eras and modernity serperate our lifestyles, but our modes of relating to nature seem to be very similar.