Wild Light

Enjoy a guest post by writer Anne Harris.

Anne writes fantasy, science fiction and, as Jessica Freely, alternative romance. Her most recent publication, Hero, is available from Torquere Books. She also mentors graduate students in Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction program.

Read her blog Friskbiskit.

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Being Outside
by Anne Harris

It’s early spring in Michigan and I’m beginning to spend time outside
again.

Every winter, my world reduces to interior spaces. Oh, I still go outside,
of course. I still take a moment, here and there, to appreciated a network
of naked oak branches against a flat gray sky, or the reflection of the moon
on the snow on a clear winter night when the cold itself is a presence:
deadly, mysterious and seemingly eternal. I savor the sunny days any way I
can manage it. I try to take a walk in a snowy wood at least once each
season.

But, for the most part, I am indoors, and I don’t care for it very much. I
find there’s something stressful about being confronted with straight lines
and right angles at every turn. Perfection, precision, absoluteness. They
give a misleading impression of what life is like: either/or. And life is
manifestly both/and.

I don’t think the human eye is particularly suited to the carpentered
environment. The human heart either, for that matter. We are animals, after
all. At least, that’s the explanation I’ve come up with for why, when
winter finally breaks and I can once again sit outside in my back yard for
hours at a time, or take off for the lake for the day, my eyes are so
grateful. They are. They soak in the broken lines, the curves, the spikes,
the clumps and bumps, and I literally feel them relax. And then I relax.
Now, what’s outside matches what’s inside. All around me is reassuring
evidence that chaos, multiplicity and disorder are not only normal, but also
functional and beautiful. I feel better about myself and the world.

No living thing is a straight line. We are all bent, in one way or another,
and better for it.

Happy spring.