because of what we share

The studies I wrote about yesterday got me thinking: It’s useful to parse our reality into categories that help provide angles of clarity. It’s also important to integrate each angle of clarity with our embodied experience.

Even the part of me that houses the neural pathways, on which my intellect travels and where my experience coheres, is made of bodied stuff.

My brain is a pulsing animal organ of instinct, organization, and consciousness, thirsty for friendship with the elements that make me up. My brain and the mushrooms, the woods and I, all share the same elemental composition. We are each instances of wild nature.

This is true whether or not I am strolling along the trail by the river in the woods. Wherever I am, when I’m spinning on a cycle of frustration or self-contained woe, it helps to remember that the would-be walk in the woods would do me good not because of its abundance and my deficit, but because of what we share.