the woods upstate / alternate title: the abundance of lack.

To be caught up in nature is something of divine sequence. Heaven's daintiness and earth's ground  is meeting, if only for a moment. Escaping the sighing and screeching and grinding of the streets for the quiet and calm and suburban lifestyle of the Adirondack mountains is, in many ways, a prescription for rest and recharging. Most of this recharging does happen within the confines of home: rather, on the long walks one takes to get out of doors at midday, when it is warmest (though warm is relative in these parts). With double the socks, triple the layers; with hand-warmers, a steaming drink, and no technology, you immerse in the forest.


I run, my boot-clad feet thudding into the powder underneath, crunching at a labored pace in what could be documented as a 17-minute mile. Like the runners on the beach in midsummer, this terrain offers resistance. But it feels so good to move, to be free in this wilderness. To escape the crackling fireplace and the being still indoors that the cold confines anatomy to. I pause only to catch my breath or to climb over a tree limb that has fallen – otherwise, I run, deep into the snowy space. Almost as if I am trying to outrun myself. Perhaps I am.



The woods are so quiet you can hear twigs flicking against the snow. Dusted surfaces, cavernous hollows now filled, the frozen earth – covered. This is the snow-land of upstate New York. Boots leave imprints, and the crunch of the heel lifting off the tarmac is one that reverberates off of the forest floor, resounding to the frozen river’s edge. The few birds that flit and fly across the sky leave echos of movement in their wake. Their wings are that can be heard by the travelers at the horizon line.

I stop because of a tree stump – words that I have never uttered before. I cannot help it - it truly looks perfect for the sitting, the resting. I flick the snow off the top of the tree-remnants, and perch. Letting my body find the rhythm of stasis once more. Though the woods are silent, I listen to a throbbing beat in my ears, a rising tide of my cardiac muscle working through the winter air.

The trees are a character all of their own. With marled and curled roots, tangled in
precipitation, they stand, upright. These once-marching men, these rigid-forest-guards, cradle
the atmosphere in their limbs, holding snow close to their appendages. Unlike the rest of the
winter world, these trees are familiar with the cold, and didn't lose their leaves when autumn
arrived. Instead, in mid-winter, they showcased the beauty of the intermingling  – of dark green
pine and frozen precipitation. The wind bows and these trees creak, a deep, low, guttural swaying filling the threads of the air.

Is this what they mean when they speak of nirvana?
To be so present in a moment that nothing else matters. To be nothing but this second of time
and space and energy and sounds and landscape. The respite of nature is felt in each bodily movement, in each involuntary muscular action. My everyday "nature" is all throttle, pulse, buzz. The silence occurs within the confines of a bedroom, and even there, even then, there are car-horns and ambulance sirens, and the street-dwellers shouting. As I stretch my neck and move my fingers to maintain blood flow, I feel a softening within my person, that recharging, that regenerating. I listen to the trees creak. I listen to the snow buzz.

There is no space without the air it contains. In this particular landscape, the air is cold, pungent. Its scent is one of a frozen over pond, of life diffused by the brisk and the clear. To breathe in is to inhale blue, to breathe indigo way deep into one’s anatomy. But to breathe in deep, a yogi’s inhale, is to experience a piercing cold, a crisp, dry ice infiltrating the home space of self. Walking causes that familiar burn to erupt in one’s belly, piercing through the core. For anyone to traipse around in those woods, simple breaths are filled with the childlike wonder at the way we can see carbon dioxide leaving our mouths. Breathing can be seen, here.

My toes begin to grow cold, reminding me of my humanity, of the parts of my anatomy that otherwise escape unnoticed. I furrow on, deeper into the woods, deeper into the forest. My own steps follow after me, my own breath is the soundtrack. The trees whistle and my shadow lingers close behind. The frozen air catches the sunlight and my breathing becomes jagged. Sitting on this tree-stump I do, overcome with emotions, saltwater pushes out of my lash line as I simply exist. My thoughts, person, resting against the land.

To walk through such a diverse nature playground, with the brush underfoot, the growth only overhead inspires imagination. In summer, the frozen ice underfoot would be a bubbling brook, the squishy layer of leaves underneath the snow perhaps, in August, is a mossy bank on which to read. The pond, one imagines, would be marvelous for the swimming, if it is as deep as expected to be. In spring, this space must be home to the dryads of Narnia, frolicking bumble bees, and wildflowers sprouting in each filament of land. Today, it is a frozen sleeted tundra of nature, shut up tight for winter’s stay.

I hold my gloved hand up to my eyes, pulling snowflakes with it. These tiny, mighty tendrils are such a metaphor for the life I lead. I’ve been in New York for nearly four years
and I still feel so anonymous, so among the masses. While this bruised for those first few months of dwelling, it has become beautiful to me over time. Though still considered the loneliest city, it is, intrinsically nice, to be seen, to feel heard. In the form of a reflection, I do. Staring at my gloved hand I am reminded of my smallness. It's a softer reminder than going a full day surrounded by people you'll never know.

The pond is perhaps the most important in this setting - the woods merely the border for its magnitude. Stretching in a lazy river fashion, it bends and turns in large proportions. Approximately a half a mile wide, one would guess it has about a foot of ice cushioning the snow’s stay. Untouched by human and animal alike, the pond’s surface is crisp and pure, a stretching blank canvas within nature. Along the edges of the pond, brush and grass (dried from the winter’s temperatures) line the shallows. They poke up through the ice layers and allow for a foliage-rich experience of the pond’s edges. They give an indication of the sloping pond floor, and as they gradually disappear, the onlooker is able to imagine, once more, what this nature
must look like in midsummer.

As a self-proclaimed writer, I often ask myself how I could put things down, to allow others access to a moment or memory that is of value to me. Sitting on this stump in the forest, I note each thing I can find, the pond, the breeze, the crunch, the lung-capacity, the cold appendages, the warm heart. It is a few moons later and I want to speak of what impacted me the most: the most overwhelming sound of all.

It is perhaps the most prominent thing to take note of, and the one that most people
would miss. Amidst the uphill and downhill terrain surrounding the pond (and beyond), sifting through the tree line and the fallen leaves and the pine branches, silence infiltrates. Like dust particles flitting and floating through the air, silence, too, seems to be composed of a thousand and one different things, different microcosms. The same way the absence of color in white is actually the abundance of color, the absence of sound here is, in many ways, a conglomerate of noise. Bustling molecules that, to the listener, are perceived as a lack of noise. To be a lonesome viewer of this space, of this time, is to be, contrary to popular belief, surrounded bythe chaotic nature of sound and noise. But, unlike a roaring crowd, a gushing waterfall, this abundance falls delicately on the ears. This chaos is one the viewer and listener often feels the need to burrow themselves into.

It’s helpful to step away - to move out of a thing for a moment, to take 2 leaps back from
the up close, and take some time to not be there. It is true of New York City. It is why there are
things like Jersey Beach trips and the jitney to the Hampton’s and having a house Upstate - to
leave is to renew one’s love affair for the city. And how true it is. For out of the clamor and
clanging and the buzzing and the throttling I went. And when I returned to subways and car
horns and yelling, I was softer, calmer, and felt more capable of each micro-moment and macro-
breath. The sayings are true - absence does make the heart grow fonder. Cliche. I lift my
pen to my mouth, a few weeks removed from this trip, and try to figure out, once more, a way to put down the culmination of what it is that spoke to me in those moments.

Somehow, even here, and even now, this collection of nature is supple. Though many poets and artists alike depict nature as a stripped bare thing, this forest seems to proclaim other truths. Perhaps, in fact, it is winter that is the more luscious of the two. For here, surveying this land, with its millions of snowflakes collected into one small corner of the world; here, with the ripples of summer’s water frozen in time; here, with the brush and the trees and the moss underfoot – this winter seems to proclaim that it is very much alive. And I am here to watch it, to revel in it, to take stock of its abundance. I am here to watch it breathe and move and exist, unfiltered, unadulterated – a singular piece of civilization, untouched. I am not in two places at once. I am not there and here. I am here. I am here.