Where would you go if you could go anywhere?

I would retreat back into my heart space.

Find a quiet place where my pace could slow to nature’s face.

I would savor a slow song of love as it intended us to find.

That beat of our heart, so quietly reminding us of a gentler place.

As I sit here listening day after day, to the bulldozers plowing down the softly rolling fields on the other side of the trees by my modern townhouse, I think about all the creatures great and small who were gently grazing there just a few months ago.

I moved to the mountains to sit with nature, but so did several dozens of thousands of others.

The locals have been furious with the growth that the pandemic brought them.

Honestly? I don’t blame them.

Majestic mountainsides now, plowed down, with concrete monoliths replacing land.

The Lorax sits helplessly as humanity pushes through, for now.

The black bears are pushed further and further out as the rapidly growing urbanization takes place right in front of our eyes.

The sound of birds that soothed my soul are now drowned out by never silent machines.

The same is true for four of the largest hillsides in this part of the world.

The peaceful silence, gone to the noise of humanization. I did not say, civilization.

After only two years, I retreat into the planning of moving further into the hills with the bears.

The colony of homeless cats, once a ‘problem’ for the neighbors, one day, just disappeared.

Today, as I begin digging deeper into the digital nomad life, determined to be one with nature,

I can already see how this sleepy town has been consumed by greed and need.

Where would I go if I could go anywhere?

To the places humans do not frequent.

To the land filled with trees.

To the quiet of an internal comfort.

To the hills, once thought, uninhabitable.

To the empty beaches, not yet run over by tourism.

To the less attractive landscapes.

To the ordinary view of the inconvenient path.

To the place where I make no path, so not to disturb the bears.