as small as a world and as large as alone

I don’t know.  I know that I associate it with very early childhood memories, because when I was born I lived in a redwood forest and some of my best memories from a time in my life when I was purely sensory in my approach to the world and hadn’t really grown more intellectual thinking yet, are from there.  And then I lived in one again when I first moved out on my own, and a lot of important things happened to me there when I went outside.  So anything that brings me back to the redwoods makes me feel connected to the world in a really intense and important way.

And the Sierras – and places that look like them – also have a really special place in my memories.  They’re one of the few places I “go to” in my head, besides the redwoods, I love to imagine myself lying on a granite mountainside and smelling the way the sun hits the granite and stuff.

So I think a lot of it may be associations with my best memories and most important connections to the world.  And I wrote about spiritual aspects of it in this post here.  And this post, a little bit.  So there’s aspects of ‘nature’ that are sacred to me, besides being something I just enjoy.  That’s why I post a lot of redwood pictures (and pictures of things in redwood forests or commonly associated with them, like banana slugs), it helps me connect with places that are important to me but thousands of miles away.

I think I was also raised to appreciate things like that.  My dad is from the country and my mom is from a small town with country all around it, and they did their best, even after we moved to the city, to keep aspects of the country as part of our daily experience.  (Even the house we eventually moved to in San Jose, the one I grew up in, was picked partly because the backyard was large and resembled a forest.  Although it was a very sad forest, in parts: someone had planted redwood trees in a climate not meant for them and they weren’t happy at all.  The pine and cedar trees did better.)

The redwoods had a feeling about them that I call marona, and it’s not a word I can explain, other than it’s like an intense feeling of home and realness and rightness and depth and oldness and a lot of other things.  I don’t know how I picked that word for it, it just seemed to fit.  So anything that reminds me of marona is very important to me as well.

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