Donald is an amateur naturalist, a writing instructor, and a university administrator at Rutgers.
That light and the memory of it: to glide along without friction in the warm spring air and take in that peculiar beauty shining all about is to find yourself suddenly in a higher order of landscapes, a place made more real and more present through the congruence of your solitude and its primeval majesty that demands no more than your awareness and of which you ask only that you be allowed to move slowly through it without intrusion or interruption.
The scenes of fall wildflowers seem accidental, and because we’re often alone with them, more intimate.
“We cling to narratives of our association with a local ecosystem, and want to believe that we fight as hard as we can against that ecosystem’s eventual disappearance under a light-blotting alien invasion as if it were our own lives and works at stake. Part of that may be delusory – this ecosystem is not our own, has no love for us, and it is our own force that keeps it from eradicating our efforts and our lifeways.”
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