Sleeping In The Forest by Mary Oliver

I thought the earth remembered me,

She took me back so tenderly

Arranging her skirts

Her pockets full of lichens and seeds.

I slept as never before

A stone on the riverbed,

Nothing between me and the white fire of the stars,

But my thoughts.

And they floated light as moths

Among the branches of the perfect trees.

All night I heard the small kingdoms

Breathing around me.

The insects and the birds

Who do their work in darkness.

All night I rose and fell,

As if water, grappling with luminous doom.

By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times

Into something better.

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I'm so excited to be a part of this amazing collaborative starting this month. We are a group of artists dedicated to putting aside demands, stress, electronics, and our four walls, and going into the wild (whatever wild that may be) with our children and our cameras and our (detached) lenses. We are from all over the world, intent on getting back to the basics, memorializing the times when we broke with the real world and did something otherwordly, even if just for a few moments. We are freelensing what we see as our children commune with nature around them. The beauty you'll see as you click through the other members of this blog circle will inspire you to do the same.

I chose to stay close to home for our first outing. We ventured out into the trails behind our house and into the adjacent field on the first truly spring-y night (spring comes late here). We are no strangers to this place, but every adventure brings us new discoveries and new delights. We dig clay and find rocks and smell blossoms and pretend our old dog is a big black wolf. We put our feet in the spring and name the tiny islands in the middle of the stream and we venture further and further into mayflowers and winterberries and the power line. But this time, we slipped into the field to run in the growing grass and the warming breeze because that's what spring feels like. After a long winter, it was like being freed after months of confinement.

Click through to read about Léa Jones in Sturbridge, MA. USA. http://leajones.net/?p=936