First off, it should be known that:

• This is my first blog post.
• Nature is a beautiful thing.

I was just thinking as I was walking home from Busted Peach practice, how nice the summer evenings are in Chicago.  You can always hear crickets chirping, you can always see clouds moving across the sky like slow, fat cows, and the air is lukewarm and breezy.  Fireflies come out.  The big thing I notice though, is that although I am living in this grand metropolis, it still feels like I’m standing in the middle of the great plains of the Midwest.  It still feels like the sky is open and the land is as flat as the ocean.  Here in the Midwest, I feel like I’m standing on the earth, and I can imagine how it slopes downward past the horizon.  This is very different from being up in the mountains, when one feels enclosed by the sharp spikes of earth jutting skyward.  In the MIdwest, I feel like I’m on the kind of earth that you feel when you touch a globe, the way the earth is round but flat to the touch at the same time.  The feeling of tonight’s Chicago evening made me feel dwarfed in comparison to the great plains that used to exist in this place, but I also felt empowered somehow.

However, that is not to say that I don’t like mountains.  In fact, I just completed a small section of the Appalachian trail with two of my good friends.  We started in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, and hiked into Maryland.  Just as I was explaining before, the big mountains do make you feel closed in by the earth, but they are still awesome.  In fact, there was this great day when we were hiking, and it was really cloudy and foggy, just like up in the mountains of Scotland.  This makes you feel even more closed in, like you’re in some magical world, or like you’re on the set of some movie about a magical world.

Lastly, nature makes you think.  I was just sitting out on my porch roof, which is accessible from my window, and I was thinking about my life, and talking to myself.  I figured a lot of things out in the fifteen minutes that I spent out there, and one of those things that I figured out was that nature makes you think.  And when I use the term “nature” here, I almost mean “environment.”  Because I think of everything in the city as nature; nature is the life that is moving around me, the complex environment of life that I am living in.  And if I move through this environment, or if I sit and watch life go by, it makes me think.

So lets sum up: great plains are awesome; so are Chicago summer evenings.  The mountains are awesome as well, and Jonah now has bragging rights because he did part of the Appalachian trail.