Think Outside

You’ve found this page, which means you probably like the woods. Far from the clangor, din and emission of fumes, a primordial reality awaits you there.

Walking in the woods, you can escape the stresses, anxieties and confusions that attend the realm of traffic jams. It’s good for you!

After a day in the woods, you return revitalized, with a surer sense of self, a resurgence of confidence, and a greater tolerance and love for the friends, families and neighbors who together make the humanly-constructed world, that tent-fabric of appearances and gestures the New York Times reports on.

This renewal of self is what the word “recreation” really means—

It might interest you, then, to know that when we look to the history of how the word “wood” was understood in the West, it meant “crazy.”

wood (adj.)
“violently insane” (now obsolete), from O.E. wod “mad, frenzied,” from P.Gmc. *woth- (cf. Goth. woþs “possessed, mad,” O.H.G. wuot “mad, madness,” Ger. wut “rage, fury”), from PIE *wet- “to blow, inspire, spiritually arouse;” source of L. vates “seer, poet,” O.Ir. faith “poet;” “with a common element of mental excitement” [Buck]. Cf. O.E. woþ “sound, melody, song,” and O.N. oðr “poetry,” and the god-name Odin.

Related posts:

1. a biocitizen moment 6.14.11
2. Northampton Association of Education and Industry & Biocitizen—linked
3. Food plants that grow like weeds: black walnut
4. nature is that which gives birth
5. let’s not use the word “environment”—& this is why