I miss the wilderness

But it seemed that I had seen the ancient afternoon of that trail, from meadow rocks and lupine posies, to sudden revisits with the roaring stream with its splashed snag bridges and undersea greennesses, there was something inexpressibly broken in my heart as though I'd lived before and walked this trail, under similar circumstances with a fellow Bodhisattva, but maybe on a more important journey, I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.

- From "The Dharma Bums" by Jack Kerouac

Wilderness can do this to you in a way that no city park or suburban forest ever can. In a wide mountain valley, walking along a muddy, snowy trail, cold and tired, and the heart breaks to the vast emptiness of Nature. A beauty so much deeper, so resonant with that which is most fundamental. It's not the beauty of a scene, of something to look at, but a beauty that peels away layer upon layer of defenses until one is raw, standing in the cold, pierced by the hollow wind. Alone, only human, broken-hearted, yet along with the dark rustling pine on the hillside, a note in the eternal silent music.  ¶ 5:46 PM