I’ve never been one of those people who needs to be with someone just so that i’m not alone. I have never felt alone. There is always some animal or some plant to keep conversation with and truthfully, i’d rather talk to a horse than a human any day. I wouldn’t say i’ve always been a loner but i would say the only times i’ve ever been happy, i was alone.
When the sun sinks lower towards the horizon and my chores are all finished, i have a tendency to just stand in the yard and enjoy the beauty; watch the last ray of light leave. One evening i was doing just that when i realized how much trouble i had gotten myself into. I had fallen in love. I was truly head over heels, passionately in love with this piece of land. The dirt, the rocks, the grass, heck even the algae that grew in between the patches of grass, choking it out for its resources. I loved the big 100 and 200 year old oak trees, the baby oaks just trying to make it, the bright green rapidly populating cedars, the little feathery mimosa trees, the cactus, the agave, and the yucca. I loved the song birds and the whippoorwills. I loved the toads, the crickets, the butterflies, the hummingbirds…i loved the deer and even the coyotes. I loved the sunsets and the storms. I loved the cold weather and the heat of summer. I loved the laundry line. I loved the noise of the neighbor’s cows. I loved the earth of those 2 acres as if my own blood was soaked into it. I suddenly realized i had become one of those people who would sell a kidney or a lung before they would watch the bank take back the land from their cold dead fingers. I had never loved a human the way i loved this plot of land. This was something deep and instinctual. I felt a great connection to the land and all the non-human inhabitants that called it home. From the spiders to the mountain lions i knew this system was something fragile that had to be protected. On this plot of land i could keep the trees from being cut down, the deer from being hunted, the bees from being poisoned, and the dirt from being paved over. This land, as long as it was my land, was free to grow unhindered and undestroyed. It was free to thrive in all its glorious wilderness. For the first time in my life i felt fear like no other time. Fear of failure. For now i had something real to lose.