Aram Mitchell
favorite things
Yesterday we invited local community to stop by the office for an open house (and Lucky Charms cereal bar). I taped some butcher paper to the wall and invited guests to scribble out answers to a few questions. One question was: What’s your favorite thing about wilderness?
Some of the things people scrawled: trees, birds, squirrels, chipmunks, hedgehogs (also an internet favorite), the unknown, space to walk and think, the smell of rain, solitude, quiet, sound of the wind in the trees, connectivity.
And one guest, who looked at the montage and shared that she doesn’t resonate with warm and fuzzy sentiments about wilderness, after a long pause wrote: Transformative.
That makes me think of something I read by Laura Feldt: “Wilderness is an ambiguous space, an arena of both catastrophe and utopia, a site of transformation, play, and reflection.”
That helps me remember that wilderness is not always friendly, but it’s good to be friends.
That has me wondering: What else do I know in my life that is beautiful and complicated?
And it has me wondering: Do I know of anything beautiful that is not also complicated?