by J. Drew Lanham
Photo by Stephen Cook
November 14, 2023
Never walk a straight line. Those routes are the institutionalized ones leading to not-so-good ends. Voltage-charged chairs, rooms with forever sleeping beds from which you’ll never arise. Instead follow the flowing irregularities nature draws — the ever-changing splines of surf or shell wrack left by high tide. Track the fox’s four-toed wander along a pond’s muddy margin. Trail the doe’s cloven hopscotch to get nowhere faster than browsing hearts-a-bustin’ will allow. Learn from the swallow and take dips and dives as privileged flight.
Wake before the dawn chorus and sing your own song of sunrise.
Follow a whippoorwill’s wailing to the dark holler where it calls loneliness, and feel its wanting as your own.
Stray away from drama. Let wildness find peace in you.
Tell secrets to birds (or butterflies or boulders or bullfrogs or bats) and know they will go no further than the next bird (or butterfly or boulder or bullfrog or bat).
Shun concrete. Shutter convention.
Feel earth somewhere on your bare human flesh; between toes or fingers, on face or whatever you dare to expose.
Be willing to become deer or mouse or thrush or wasp or wildflower. Be fish. Be newt. Be belly low and see the undersides of mushrooms.
Curiosity must never wane, but make allowances for ignorant bliss.
Stay away from rules that make you otherwise than who heart tells you to be.
J. Drew Lanham is a native of Edgefield, South Carolina, and works as a Distinguished Alumni and Provost's Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University, where he teaches and conducts research as a conservation and cultural ornithologist. An award-winning author, his book The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair With Nature won the Philip Reed Environmental Writing Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center and was most recently named a "Scholarly Book of the Decade" by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Drew is also a poet, writing Sparrow Envy, and was named Poet Laureate of Edgefield County in 2018. He lives in Seneca, South Carolina.
Stephen Cook is a Georgia-based traveler, adventurer, and photographer. By shifting his focus away from the camera gear and scene planning and toward the experiences themselves, he has been able to capture genuine, candid moments of exploration and nature. He hopes to inspire a sense of adventure in his viewers — to instill a healthy level of restlessness. Just enough to reject being satisfied by images on a screen and to aim beyond yesterday’s comfort zone.
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