I don't want to write about Nature

And now for something a bit different...  Here's a piece I wrote in my writers' group today.  The prompt was "I don't want to write about..."

I don’t want to write about Nature because I have nothing to say.  How can I admit to people that when I’m in the woods, my pervasive invasive thought is to worry that a branch will fall on me and knock me senseless?  I worry another flood will come like happened when we camped out when I was 9, and Agnes, the hurricane, rose overnight and knocked out the bridge so we had to hike out of the woods, forging streams that had turned into raging swells.  I worry it’ll be so cold we’ll wake up – or not wake up – with icicles on our noses, and I don’t have a dog or two siblings anymore to sleep with to retain at least a modicum of body heat like I did when I was 8 camping in the woods on the coldest August night on record.

I worry I’ll get tick bites and will end up with Lyme’s disease again and I won’t know it until the damage is so pervasive It ruins my life – sort of like happened two years ago when I finally got comfortable hiking in Larus Park in the Spring but then couldn’t explain the six week headache that literally flattened me for several days and turned out to be Lyme’s disease – maybe.

I worry about sand flies imbedding themselves in my thigh and my not noticing the spread of the red oozing gushy sore like happened to a friend of mine on the cruise two months ago.  I worry about organisms invading my digestive system and causing my stool to shift shape and color like has been the case since I returned from the cruise.

So I don’t want to write about Nature, it’s beauty, the connection I feel to God out there among the tress, the sand, the stars, the animals – those raging wild beasts whose only desire is to beat me to eating the food I’ve so painfully carried up the mountain – not for the bear – for me.  I don’t want to write about the cute little critters staring at me with their luminous brown eyes, the extension of God’s creation incarnate.  Those are the same damn ones that got into my house, crawled up and across the rafters then fell with a horrifying plop between the walls in the basement bathroom.  The one I had to listen to for days trying to scratch itself out of said walls as its scratches got weaker and weaker until finally they faded completely and the stench grew until it overpowered all reason and drove me out into the very outdoors I do not want to write about.

3/1/2013