Like everyone else, I get out of town to be in a place where a good chunk of nature remains available to my senses. When our souls need restoring we do not go sit in the middle of parking lots. We go where life is a little less scripted, a little less conscripted.

An older couple stopped by for a visit one afternoon while we were at the Land. Retired people, well-off, well-educated. We sat in front of the cabin gazing out over the valley and Lake Katepwa in the middle distance. On cue, the woman said, "My, what a place you have here! I can just feel the stress melting away."

You hear such talk, the same clinical terms, from people for whom a gravel road is an adventure. The wind fresh from poplars and meadows eddies through their blood and yet they are at a loss to name the thing that moves them. One step beyond constructed and landscaped surfaces and we are in terra incognita. We are dying within our shelter. People used to die of exposure. Nothing gets a piece of us any more if we can help it. Wind, rain, ice, and sun, the creatures that bite or hook into us, wait for us on the other side of doors and walls and caskets.

Once, children inoculated themselves with mud and microbes. Remember? People pulled foals from mares. Woke to crowing birds. Who stumbles now in storm from porch to barn door? The long hours lying in the grass are gone. Time with lambs and calves, bird nests and dragonflies made us. Time apart from them is unmaking us.

I dreamed last night of horses escaping from crude corrals that I had made. Arriving after a long absence to find the hay and water drawn down, I opened the gate an inch and they burst out upon the unfenced fields and I was lost as to how to get them back. How do I get the horses back? My daughter dreams, the nightmares of a housebound three-year-old in midwinter, are of foxes. The fiery-red brush sweeps across her unconcious, and she is scared of its wild touch. Now she runs in terror if she finds herself alone in a room. Yet every morning she insists on wearing the same skirt, the shinny bronze one her mother sewed out of faux snakeskin.

Pre-dawn dispatches from the cerebellum urge a lowering of barriers, a return to the senses: abandon shelter, find communion in exposure. See this luffing sail, hear this canine howl, taste this bread, smell this violet, touch this stone. Blessed are the unwanted abrasions, invasions, and privations; the grace of all that, in eluding and pursuing our flesh, draws us nearer sacrament.

If you wanted to reduce crime in the United States...if that were your sole purpose, you could euthanize every republican in the country, substantially increase social spending and your crime rate would go down.  That would be an impossibly ridiculous thing to do, but the crime rate would go down.

Thanks for your wisdom Mr. Bennett it has all kinds of applications.

So I drove some 50 minutes and 70 kilometers (45 miles for you friendly Americans) out of my small town to visit another small town not all that unlike the one I had just come from.  To be honest I didn't make the trip to see the town, it was dark and the street lights there aren't all that bright.  I went to see a woman I had met and to sing a little karaoke.  Lets be honest again, there are closer places to sing karaoke, I had to drive through a city of about 375 000 people on my way, there must have been some karaoke to be sung somewhere there.  No, mostly I went to see the woman, she is quite a woman from what I can tell.  But hey it's pretty hard to tell, she's the bar manager you see and so when I am at the bar she's working.  So I end up talking to some of the local regulars.  There's a guy named Kenney, at my hometown  bar Kenney's name would be Peter.  Kenney or Peter, Penny or Keter is an older chap, been around the world he has and he is always more than happy to tell you about it.  He is never quite sober and will always stay for just one more.  His stories always seem to come with a hint of embellishment but there is no harm in that, it adds colour and it keeps you listening.  So the stories come and they keep coming and under the colour and flash there is a wisdom.  I am reminded of a conversation with Peter, "Mark I don't understand why a good guy like you is single.  You have to forget about the girl behind you that's her loss.  You won't get a girl sitting on your butt, you've got to go out and get her"  Peter is the kind of guy who would do just that.  At 70 years of age he takes his woman dancing at the bar and wears a suit and tie as if they were at the Savoy.  Peter knows how to make the woman he is with feel special.  I may be no Peter but the least I can do is talk a little more to my friend the bar manager, find out who she is and where she wants to go.  That I can do.  I'll figure it out.