The lonelier the place, the better it pleased me: its silence, its aura, its peculiar conformation, its enclosedness.
--John Fowles
Woke up this morning with an agonizing urge to be an absolute nobody in a world gone mad with everybody trying to be a “somebody.” To be unknown and unseen like a distant star in an undiscovered galaxy, a dandelion loafing beneath the sun in some deserted pasture, to be an anonymous breeze that rustles the ferns of an ancient forest at the edge of the world. Ah, yes... To be far away, adrift and alone, sauntering in a leafy alcove, "where Nature moves, and Rapture warms the Mind." To get out there beyond the perimeter of this barbed wire civilization, far removed from worldly titles and deadlines and the delusional drudgery and pandemonium of endless ambition. To be barbarically alive, to savor the pure lifeblood of our primitive marrow, to cleanse myself of the filth of steel-and-asphalt reality, to resuscitate the inner archaic spirit, to unite the conscious with the shadow and allow grace to devour what’s left of my iridescent heart. Into the timeless woods I go where the moonlight illuminates the infinite peace of things. I go to the woods to dance barefoot like a demented shaman in the muck of the meadows. I go to the woods as an antidote to modernity, to wander at ease among the wild geraniums and thickets, unearthing the primordial savage within. I go to the woods, in the words of Thoreau, “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
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This poem hit the spot this morning, right from the beginning.
to be an absolute nobody
in a world gone mad
with everybody trying
to be a “somebody.”
I remember a dear friend of mine shouting “Why is there so much KNOWING in the world?!” He was lamenting the loss of the curious and open heart.
I feel the same way, sometimes, about everyone trying to be a “someone.”
Thank you for the poem today. 🙏
As Muir sang: into the forest, I go to lose my mind and find my soul. Beautiful poem . In the trees, I feel my pulse.