Month: July 2024

I’m a little bit miffed with my experience with nature lately.  Having recently met with an outdoorsy illness from a spider bite, I’m not keen at the moment with the great outdoors.

Some people are outdoorsy, others are not.  Who do you picture when you think of the word, outdoorsy?  Someone skiing down a mountainside?  A person dressed in flannel, chopping firewood?

When you think of “outdoorsy,” I’m guessing you don’t picture a person attached to an IV bag filled with antibiotics, fighting off the effects of a spider bite.  Or, you don’t think of the person carrying an inhaler or oxygen tank, trying their best to breathe through the fog of particles in the air.

“Outdoorsy” elicits images of vitality, movement and synchrony with nature.  We’re talking free-range chickens, not the ones cooped up indoors.

Two instances come to mind when I think of the outdoors.  First is from a television show that I enjoyed quite a few years ago.  It was a comedic detective show starring a man named Monk, who was afflicted with somewhat severe OCD.  The line that I remember was something like, “nature’s all over me, get it off,” as he frantically brushed leaves or some such “dirt” off of his jacket.

Notice that people who are not so fond of nature, would definitely call soil, dirt.  Folks who are keen on nature, would possibly call dirt, earth or something similarly holistic.

The other great outdoors thing that my husband and I often reference comes from the great French post-impressionist artist, Paul Cezanne.  Comparing the beautifully lit, nature-rich Aix en Provence to Paris, which he called “nature starched and tormented.”   Have you ever noticed people, who’ve chosen to live surrounded by nature, sweeping the dirt and vacuuming the leaves outside?

Nature and the outdoors are considered entirely in the eye of the beholder.  Nature, for instance, is not all roses, bunnies, bluebirds, fawns, and soft beds of leaves.  It’s also decay, thorns, ticks, vultures, and hornets.

Zero degrees and 95 degrees Fahrenheit are the most hideous extremes.  I’m reminded though, that all the complaining in the world won’t change the discomfort we feel at these extremes that are natural to the summer and winter seasons.  That’s nature.  It’s probably human nature to complain about it.

Some people are oblivious to nature until some aspect of it hurts them.  Maybe they get a sunburn, suffer respiratory torment from breeze-borne plant reproduction, gesundheit by the way, itchy skin from this bug bite or that, a deer obliterates the hood of their car, a bird poops on their car window, a porcupine sends their dog to the vet, a root finds its way into their living space, etc.

Then there are folks who make sport of nature with hiking, boating, floating, rambling, hunting, skiing, fishing, planting, gardening, seeding, feeding, watching, preserving, conserving, and protecting it.  These humans are probably first thought of when you mention “outdoorsy.”

Nature and the great outdoors are double edged swords.  They’re not one or the other, they cut both ways.

Nature can be both heartbreaking to the human soul as well as delightful beyond description.  Animals can be terrorists as well as the most beautiful creatures ever made.  Nature is the very definition of dichotomy.

Nature is by definition suitable to the outdoors.  Spiders, ticks, mosquitoes, raccoons, bees, snakes, foxes, and such belong outdoors.  I’ve always felt somewhere down deep that we humans have invaded on the natural territory of these species.  Then there’s the Genesis scripture that tells humans to subdue and take dominion of these co-conspirators of the earth.

I think in twenty-first century earth, we humans just once in a while crave the simple, uncluttered life of nature.  We may want for a moment to trade in the conveniences and distractions of civilization because these things can literally make us sick.

We sometimes want to participate in the reality of nature in a “life imitates art” kind of way.  Because in art, nature is perfect and beautiful.  But nature, in reality, can be devastatingly intrusive to the civilized way of life of us folks acculturated to convenience and comfort.

When spiders come indoors, bees sting, ticks bite us, and mosquitoes infect us with disease, nature is seen to have gone too far.  In summary, when the great outdoors comes indoors, we humans rebel against her.  She’s only to enter indoors by invitation.

We invite nature indoors via house plants, stuffed animals, domesticated pets, books, and home-extensions such as porches, decks and window gardens.  We have taken that Genesis scripture and domesticated it to our twenty-first century liking, subduing nature and making it work for us and not against us.

Thank God for medicines, many of which are derived in some way from nature, much of it essentially homeopathic at its core.  We seem to work with nature to fight nature and that’s the direction we’ve gone.  I guess, in that sense, we’re all outdoorsy.  We’re indoor-outdoor carpet, so lie down and enjoy it.

Note to self, look up the origins of the phrase, “The tall and the short of it.”  This was one of those rare times when I completely had it wrong.

There is no such phrase.  Correctly, the phrase is “the long and the short of it.”

Okay, that changes things, or does it?  This should really be the editor’s motto because it is a noun phrase that means that you’re making a brief statement telling only the most important parts of something.

That’s what an editor does.  We slash long passages of prose from wordy originals into concise and to the point masterpieces – or so we think.

I am an editor in my day job.  Specifically, I edit front and back matter in collections of music and sometimes the body of longer books, with lots of prose.

When I’m editing someone else’s work it’s relatively easy to see the forest from the trees and cut out all of the “extra” material in order to let the most important parts stand out and shine.  The writer or owner of that material thinks every tree in the entire forest is important or it just isn’t the forest that they know and love.

My second job, and frankly my favorite one is as an essayist.  An essayist is probably by definition, verbose and the bane of an editor.  We do like to elaborate.  There are lots of trees in our forest, and of many varieties.

My work is therefore a contradiction in terms and from time to time is reflected in my columns.  I’m getting better at self-editing but once in a while I’m compelled to go on and on, impressed with one idea after another.

For example, a good editor would probably have slashed my first paragraph describing how I started this column idea with an erroneous assumption about a non-existent phrase.  This is not important material.  However, it’s interesting material to an essayist.

This essayist will tell you something I find interesting albeit not important.  I don’t think interesting things are necessarily unimportant, even though they are often completely random.  For instance, why do you think I mixed up the tall and the short of it with the long and the short of it?

Tall and short, fat and skinny, manic and depressive, big and small… are all on a spectrum of extremes.  I suppose that makes average or normal, the standard, maybe even the goal.  But I’m increasingly not sure that’s my goal in life.

Freud would probably say I have a problem with being short, or brief or concise or even average.  I want to tell the long story and avoid making the long story short, if I can.  It’s not as much fun.

You’ve seen the image of a domestic kitten looking into a mirror, seeing a lion looking back at him.  Well, this editor looks into a mirror and sees an essayist looking back at me.  Or maybe more colorfully and with my lame attempt at a walked into a bar joke, an editor walks into a bar, drinks too many words, gets happy drunk on ideas, and comes out an essayist.

They say that if a hiker crosses the path of a bear, you should stand as tall as you can, look big, and ominous.  Look as bog-footy as you can.  That’s what that kitten-to-lion does in his mirror.

When you’re encouraging someone to “stand tall,” you’re telling them to stretch, have courage, go forth, and conquer.  This is proven to work in the form of the fake smile.  If you’re sad or having a bad day and you force or fake a smile, the very act of the smile articulation causes a surge of happy hormones.

Usually in the end, both sides of my writing personality conjoin and I present a work that you can and want to read in less than an afternoon.  Sometimes that may be a tall order, or even a tall tale, but one thing I won’t give you is short shrift.

I would wager that editors sleep better than essayists.  This essayist slept two hours then awakened thinking, “I need to work on that ‘standing tall’ column.”  When six a.m. rolled around, some research was completed and the long and the short of it never materialized, but a nice million-word essay developed.

Perhaps tomorrow night the editor will get her essential eight hours of sleep, satisfied that the most important material was covered and the point made.  She kept the word count reasonable and she cut out a few of the fun puns that the essayist originally wanted really badly to include.

There was a sacrifice made to make the long and the short of it.  But she looks in the mirror and, in the end, it turns out she’s standing tall after all.