The more time I spend here, almost a year now, the easier it feels. I notice the sticks, so they don’t poke my feet, I step only on leaves, and they feel like rugs beneath me. 

In the summer the forest feels like a living room. I can walk from my bedroom door to the kitchen just as easily as I can walk from my back door to the threshold of the forest, or the meditation loop. 

The forests in Vermont feel old in a lot of ways. I suppose that’s because they are. There’s strata of age to them. Granite shelves far older than the Himalayas, glacial deposits much younger than that, risen quartz, and barbed wire.

You can look down and feel half a hundred different little epochs and stories beneath your feet and only a few of them have to do with people at all.