Remember.

When I was a kid, I lived across the road from "The Woods." This was where you'd find me nearly every day. Inside this wooded playground was a shadowy, pine needle-strewn floor with firmly worn sandy paths that led anywhere I wanted to go ... to the Boston Tea Party, Mackinac Island, fur trapping with French explorers, WWII Germany (I was a history freak), or just around the next sharp bend ...

I dreamed in those woods.

And although most of the time I was there with my friends, my memories, my dreams were singular. Smells, sounds, tastes (all the different kinds of mint), all had meaning. Clouds weren't clouds. Trees weren't trees. Shadows weren't shadows. My imagination was born in those pines. The clouds, trees, and shadows were a box of odds and ends, like I used to find on Dad's workbench, that could be assembled to be anything, and take me anywhere I needed to go.

Last night, for as long as I could stay awake, I began reading another Derrick Jensen book, A Language Older Than Words.

The first paragraph ...
There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.

I'm sure Jensen has a bigger idea in mind for me, I view things differently reading his work, but that paragraph took me back to the woods, where a great deal of who and what I am began.

For now, that's my point.

Where did it take you?