Eating face first from the earth - #173

And something exciting for this fall!

Paid subscriptions are now on pause as Shangrilogs takes a summer break. I hope you all have a chance to head into the woods. Speaking of, here’s my latest piece for The Guardian all about humans shitting willy nilly in the backcountry. Enjoy!

And! Skip to the end for something magical coming this fall. 🍂💫🪵

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In this immersive, seasonally guided course, we’ll step away from the noise of productivity culture and into a slower, richer rhythm — one that honors cycles, nurtures your nervous system, and rekindles your relationship with both the natural world and your creative voice.

You don’t need an MFA, a book deal, or a perfect morning routine. You just need a willingness to step outside and start listening again — to the earth, to your body, and to the stories waiting to come through you.

I took the baby on a hike earlier this week. Hiking, in addition to being driven around on dirt roads, are his two favorite methods of napping. He'll allow himself to be napped in a front carrier, but it's quite a bit of effort to convince him to fall asleep with that method these days. He'll also take a nap in his crab or in our bed, but it takes an hour to get him down, and he'll only sleep for 20 minutes. So into the backpack he went at a crisp, rhythmic pace. Too much lollygagging and he stays too curious. But when you hit the right stride, moving efficiently through the forest and fens, he falls fast asleep.

On this particular hike, I kept strange company.

Five spiders came across my path on this hike. Each one was in the middle of the trail as I was walking along it and they were walking across it.

Each one—had I not been noticing, had I not been looking—was precariously underfoot. And each time, I had to adjust my stride to not step on a spider. More curious, each spider was different. This was not the same species. It was not a spider colony hatching on the same day. These were five different species of spiders, all crossing the trail. All decidedly within footfall, begging for my cognition to notice them and spare them from an absentminded crushing.

I made a mental note to google spiders when I got home. What does a spider signify as an omen? Do spiders hatch all year? What species of spiders live in alpine environments in Colorado? What are they eating? Who is eating them?

I don’t have any particular love for spiders, but we’ve reached a stable detente in our lives. In my younger years, fueled by an early and unsanctioned watching of the movie Arachnophobia, I would capture them in glasses and tupperware tins, waiting for a parent to arrive with their bigger hands and bigger responsibilities. I wanted them dead. One spider meant more spiders as far as I was concerned, and more spiders meant calamity, a rising tide of fear.

In my 20s, I slowly became more aware of reality, as one hopefully does. And reality was clear: I was enormous and terrifying and capable of sweeping destruction by hand, by foot, by spray, by book, and these spiders were merely maintenance staff seeking out a dry corner. I stopped killing them, save for the very few who violated my personal space, including one very intrepid soldier who came sauntering out of my hairline down my forehead like emerging from a forest walk. I was putting on mascara in the mirror and lost my mind and my footing.

Once, on a birding trip to Belize, I decided to take a jungle night walk hosted by the eco lodge where I was staying. It was a half moon night, and with no light pollution, we easily tailed the guide’s single flashlight. He stopped at the edge of the lodge’s lightly manicured grounds, and cast his light back and forth over the grass.

“You see how the grass here glitters?” he asked as the light danced. Everyone nodded, curious, and he held the light still. The grass didn’t glitter so much as it looked like a small city, seen from very high, an airplane passing innocuously above.

“Every reflection of light you see? That’s a spider.”

Some of the guests recoiled, only to realize the grass on the other side of the path likely held the same denizens of soil.

This was the nature of the walk. For every person hoping to see a jaguarundi or an ocelot, we saw more and more spiders. There were spiders everywhere: across the trail, in every tapped hole, up and down the bark and cliff and loam. We saw what the jungle had to offer, and we would be up the entire night thinking about it.

Our guide was, as you can imagine, incredibly thoughtful in regards to the spiders’ lives. They were caretakers in the forest, just as they were in our homes. And while on the walk, it was worth remembering, not only is the jungle their home, but everywhere we’ve built. Like cats, spiders will move in and get to work. You can be roommates, you can coexist.

Earlier this summer I went on a plant walk in my valley, led by a farmer and plant expert. She was helping local residents to identify edible plants in our valley so we could, in theory, be more connected to this land. Every year, she goes on a sojourn through part of this region, eating only what she can recover from the earth.

She described moments when, on these sojourns, she would lean down like a horse and chomp off the top of a flower with her mouth, no hands involved, so she could truly return to nature.

I laughed. I’d like to say I laughed just at the idea, but I laughed a little bit at her, and it was obvious she knew we would. She was ready for it, herding our laughs like running cattle.

“Let me ask, what makes it funny?’

And I wasn’t sure. It seemed ridiculous with our hands and thumbs to pretend to be deer or horses. But as I probed the thought further, I asked myself: when else do humans eat just with their mouths?

We eat just with our mouths when bobbing for apples. We eat just with our mouths when being fed grapes. We eat just with our mouths licking our plates or our partners. We eat just with our mouths for play, for joy, for love.

This woman wasn’t on hands and knees to reconnect with nature, but to reconnect with her own nature, to strip herself of the confines of grocery aisles and serving spoons to remember what it’s like to play. And I laughed at her because I had forgotten.

On the walk with the baby, by the third spider, I was laughing, dancing with every new friend on the trail. I would lean the pack down so the baby could see the tiny shapes visiting us on the trail. The aspen leaves clapped and danced with reverie as we skipped over streams and sticks and spiders and stems.

Home from the walk, I turned to the computer to ask about the spiders as omens. It was the usual mixed bag, but most people agreed: they were a sign of luck, creativity, and connectedness. I took the baby to our room where a spider was living in the corner. There, the breeze still flows and snow weaves its way onto the floorboards in the winter. But for spring and summer and fall, the spider catches her lot. I explained to the baby we don’t touch, we look! But we don’t touch.

“Deh?” he asked, eyebrows up, eyes wide.

“Detente,” I told him. “No touch.” The spider moved, I flinched, and then I carried him away.

Even high on this hill in this house made of logs in this valley of few, I am still finding my way back to nature.

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Have you been yearning for a better connection with nature? To feel more embodied and more emboldened?

This autumn, I’m offering a seasonally guided course on how to step away from the noise of productivity culture and into a slower, richer rhythm — one that honors cycles, nurtures your nervous system, and rekindles your relationship with both the natural world and your creative voice.

You don’t need an MFA, a cabin, or a perfect morning routine. You just need a willingness to step outside and start listening again — to the earth, to your body, and to the stories waiting to come through you.

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