Spring has wrapped us all in warm green. Birds are flitting around, and reptiles are no doubt crawling from under their rocks. I can look out my window and see the bright green of new leaf growth fuzzing the upper branches of the trees in the park. Natural seasonal changes always energize me.

I'm continuing to think about what resonates with me. Last night, walking around in the dark at work, I felt a sudden surge of belonging. The quiet hills and the darkness resonate within me. I stood there in the dark for a bit, looking out towards the glowing undersides of the clouds above the city (sure, I could see more than one city from where I stood, but it's all really just one city - the "dense donuts of development", as Richard Louv calls the suburbs in his book, "Last Child in the Woods") and realized that I've never really felt a connection with anyplace I've lived. They've all been houses, but not homes. There are no roots grounding me anywhere. I'm floating free. Sure, there are people who ground me, but never architecture. The hills seem a better home than the houses.

I sometimes describe myself as a spiritual person, but that's a relatively meaningless term - meaningless because it has so many different meanings. In my case, I would have to say I subscribe to a vague form of nature spirituality. I coat my experiences in nature with almost mythic overtones at times, seeing portent in the appearance of certain animals at certain times, or finding in wilderness a balm for my soul. I've felt like this for as far back as I can remember. Perhaps another time I'll have to delve into childhood experiences. A more recent case in point though, is the time a friend and I were on a roadtrip, and it seemed as if the crows were following us. Everywhere we went, we seemed to draw the attention of of crows. They would land nearby, or fly slowly across the road in front of us. It struck a chord in me to such an extent that at the apex of the lazy geographical circle we were drawing as we drove (Flint, Michigan, to be precise), I got a tattoo of a crow on my arm to serve as a reminder. Nearly a decade later, when I started working at an outdoor school, I took the name "Crow" as my camp name. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of kids across the Bay Area who know me only as Crow. Crows are never far from my mind and heart these days. They seem to have a habit of appearing at just the right times.

There are many other moments and stories that would illustrate my vague point here, but I can't recount, or even remember, them all. Let it suffice to say that stories have power and that the world, both indoors and out, would be a duller place without them.

Currently listening to: Nurse With Wound "Live at Bar Maldoror", and looking forward to seeing them tonight.