When people are involved in their work, they experience, and produce as experience, a dissolution of the reified object, and for that matter, the reified subject. Involvement in the world is a negation process, a dissolving. There is no such “thing” as the environment, since, being involved in it already, we are not separate from it. – Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature

Perhaps I shouldn’t have picked up on a whim, on the strength of an appealing cover, what turned out to be a very mediocre hiking memoir by a very average dude directly on the heels of a meaty and nuanced aesthetics work on the problems in environmental writing. But I did, and I got some unexpected things out of it, more from my own reactions than from the book itself.

I am reminded, first of all, that so many of the brightest lights in ecological, nature, and place-based American literature – and especially of the American West – came to writing from work that involved slow and careful observation of the natural world. Dude describes exploring Capitol Reef with a copy of Ed Abbey in his pack, without seeming to take any significance from the fact that at the time Abbey wrote Desert Solitaire, he was a working park ranger. Abbey was a fire lookout too. So were Norman Maclean, Doug Peacock, Philip Connors. Aldo Leopold was a forester of course, and it’s less known that John Muir was a geologist, and the line between art and science blurs in the work of the many, many naturalists and ecologists who are better known as writers.

That kind of observation, that kind of immersion, takes time. And when my life shifted away from that immersion, feared becoming the kind of dilettante nature writer and artist I hate, dipping in and out of places, skimming beauty and poignancy off the surface without the give-and-take of deeper relationships.

I’ve been living with my heart somewhere else. In the past, with John, with my small children, with a the aspirations of a younger and more naïve version of myself. In the future, with my books and art in a home of my own making, with friends in and out and good food and wine and music and meaningful work. One a beach or mountainside, a hiking trail or riffling river or the built-up layers of history along street in a city where the language is not my own, anywhere but here, in the textureless grey mundanity of a square-box apartment too far from anything that I feel drawn or attached to. Marking time, treading water, waiting. Just waiting.

Recently I’ve become afraid that I’m so out of practice at being in the world that I don’t even know how anymore. And so I started practicing, and what I found intriguing was that sensation of lostness itself – the experience in my body of living through a liminal time and space, the ebb and flow of my mood and energy, what I resist and what I desire, what sustains and what dismays me.