Closer To My Roots

My favourite thing about Cleveland is the Metroparks.  I will actually choose the longer route to and from work most days so I can drive through them.  Everything is starting to turn green and bloom at the moment and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  I don't know why, I'm not a super 'outdoorsy'  person.  I can't only handle being in the sun for more than about 2 minutes before I need to crawl into the nearest hole and hibernate. My mum calls me a mushroom because I spend too much time indoors.  The other day, I was at my cousin's track meet and I had to hide from the sun under an umbrella. Yup, I was that person.

But there's something about the leaves and the branches and that speckled sun light... I grew up going on hikes with my Mum. She grew up in the Dublin mountains and the little cuts she got falling out of those trees turned into scars. She can't escape it, the rivers and the plants fueled her as a child and shaped her into the adult she is today. She's a hippie.  Not the tie-dye-wearing, incense-burning wannabe type, it's just who she is.  Well that particular apple didn't fall too far from the literal tree.

Being surrounded by trees makes me feel at peace and my Mum is probably the reason that I love pretentious quotes like this: 'By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us' - Robert Macfarlane

So I'll drive an extra 10 minutes so I can feel modest. So I can feel all warm and fuzzy inside, feel closer to my roots and closer to who I am.