Meditations on Nature

I've always been close to nature. Or, at the least, closer than most other people of my social cadre. It started when I was a kid and would hop the back fence to go scramble around the oak-wooded hillsides. Sometimes I went exploring with the neighbor boys, but more often than not I went out on my own, sometimes wandering up to a mile from the house. This was before cellphones, of course, so even in that short bit of journeying I felt like I had truly disconnected from civilization and was a part of the nature around me, rich in sights and sounds and smells. The only tenuous link back to the "real world" was the sharp peal of a ships bell my dad had bolted to the back porch and my mom would ring if she wanted me to come home. Looking back through the lens of today's world, it seems amazing that my parents let me wander on my own into the wild (a wild that, in retrospect, I realize had a non-zero chance of having mountain lions present). But it was a formulative experience for me; even as I have migrated slowly away from such rich natural exposure in my daily life, I still feel comfortable and connected with nature the minute I step back into it.

But part of me still yearns for more connection with it. Part of me still marks the changing of the season by the changing of the birdsong, by the shifting of the color palette of the hillsides, and can pick these things out even when drowning in the noise and colors of the urban city.

Rebirth, again

Long story short: I am relaunching my paleo blog, with a new site, new format, and new hotness overall. I originally started a blog on Tumblr, but rapidly decided I didn't like Tumblr's format and drifted away. However, I have found myself researching the world of paleo/primal more and more, coming up with interesting thoughts and observations, so I decided to give things a new, fresh go.

However, my inaugural post from the old blog, has many important thoughts that I thought bore repeating. It was originally posted June 5th, 2011, one week after I committed myself to my new path; my "paleolution," so to speak. So I have reposted this entry, both for posterity, and to remind myself why I set myself on this revolution in the first place: