January 2024 Vol. 262
Dear ones,
There is something magical about snow. Growing up in Colorado, where we’d get feet falling in a day, not inches, I learned to love the majesty of a quiet forest. To watch the blanket of white for hunting owls, soft-footed cougars, and fleet foxes. It was quiet. Something that, as an adult, I’m learning I crave. It was in that isolation that my creativity was born. There were also darker things lurking, the specter of monsters in the woods. For all the peace, there was fear, too—dark, long nights in the backcountry bred all sorts of chilling imaginations. If we are a product of our upbringing, mine isn’t hard to discern.
Nashville received a season’s worth of snow in a single day this week. We are not isolated here; we have plenty of neighbors within shouting and waving distance. But the pervasive silence, the whisper of frozen flakes relentlessly driving to the ground, piling upon themselves, crimson flashes against the deep white diving for blackoil sunflower seeds, and the quiet, quiet, of the woods pulled me back. It was a Colorado snow, tiny flakes coming down hard, too soft to make snowmen, but perfect for sledding. We are still snowed in, and an ice storm is bearing down. We will be in this loop for several more days. Enforced isolation...and I am loving every minute.
I started writing novel #32 this week. It was inevitable. The book takes place in a thriving biophilic community, one that is quite isolated, led by a charismatic founder who spent formative time in the wilderness. I’ve been researching the idea of isolation, and why some people are so drawn to it. Is it a function of severe introversion? A need to connect with nature instead of people, to acknowledge our place in the universe as temporary beings in this world? Again and again, people seek the woods, seek the isolation, but ironically, they write about it, sharing what they’ve experienced and what they’ve learned. Why the need to document for others when you’re searching for yourself in the wilderness? I’ve done the same above, trying to impart the wonder that is a silent soul faced with Mother Nature’s deceptive gentleness. Snow looks so beautiful, yet the dangers lie deep.
Right now, I have more questions than answers—the perfect jumping-off point for a novel.
The line above about the pathless woods is part of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage from Lord Byron’s epic poem of self-discovery. It was the epigraph of the movie Into The Wild, the story of Christopher McCandless’s ill-fated journey into the Alaskan wilderness. I seized upon it as the epigraph for this new novel, and in searching for the whole poem to read, found my handwritten entry in the Norton Anthology of English Literature: “Byronic Hero”. That 19-year-old English Lit major me was as enamored of this archetype as I am now tickled me, and brought me home yet again.
It also reminds me that one man’s hero is another man’s villain.
If you’d like to experience a modern, firsthand account of a small family living in the woods of Colorado, I send you to Shangrilogs, written by Kelton Wright. Her journey has transfixed me.
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