All spring and summer I've watched the teeming life out here in the five acre woods. With the luxury of time and access I've spent dozens and dozens of hours out here, not counting the many hours sitting right here gazing out the windows. I walk out this back door ten, twenty times a day. It really is a microcosm of an ecosystem, water and trees and undergrowth and squirrels, chipmunks, birds a plenty, humming birds, woodpeckers butterflys and bugs, flowers wild and planted, color, mostly deep rich green. There are buckeyes and acorns and the constant popping of shells on the deck from squirrels overhead picking and peeling. The creek dries and floods and has stones for chipmunk crossings and for birds to perch to drink water that is clear except for after a storm when it runs muddy chocolate.
There is death and sex and a food chain, woodpeckers pecking bugs out of dead trees, birds bobbing for worms, wood bees sawing at my hot tub. There is beauty in the chain, a leaf laced by chomping, the chompers sexing as they eat, enlarge the photo, you can see the mounted couples. There is gentle rain and crashing thundering sky lit storms, snowfalls and scorching dry heat. I don't manicure much, I've let it grow weedy in places preferring the natural spread or maybe I'm just lazy.
There is fire for cooking and warming, chairs for lounging, a tub for soaking, and enough privacy for intimacy and standing naked in the rain. In many ways this wood, this space of green, is why I'm here. I often wonder how different it would have been these past few months had I been confined to a tiny triangle of backyard, privacy fence surrounded yet with five, six houses within a heard whisper. How confining and restraining it would have felt. A house you really couldn't see out of and even if you could, there wasn't much to see. It was a wonderful inner space but the walls would have drawn in, squeezed and pressed.
There are days, and evenings, that I think it is some of the only sanity I have.
It took some time to be accepted into it. For birds and other critters not to scatter upon hearing the door slide open. Now, they stay, glance at me, and go back to their business. They feed and live with me, sometimes only a few feet away. I have a barking squirrel, another tiny one that is as brave as he is fast. Fat doves eating from the ground, yellow and red finches who only eat niger, cardinals and blue jays for color, a visiting hawk who occasionally takes one of them for lunch. Canadian geese V'ing overhead with squawks and a bull frog in a nearby pond that I hear at night. Fireflies by the hundreds that light the night.
It's amazing what you see when you change your focus.