Letting go of love is sort of like watching a droplet of water fall from something. If you’ve ever sat inside on a rainy day and watched water drip from your gutters and roof, you’ll probably recognize this.

As you watch, you begin to see the weight of the water forming a droplet, slowly. Sometimes the bead will move a bit, sliding back and forth along the gutter as the weight of the water settles inside it, buffeted by wind or other raindrops. But it continues to grow and swell before the weight of it becomes too much for the surface tension to withstand. Before you know it, the swollen bead has detached itself from the gutter and begins hurtling in a free-fall towards the ground on its way to journey it has no knowledge of, a future it cannot predict.

I feel like losing love is like that. It swells and grows heavy, the weight of tensions and misplaced feelings pressing against the fibers of our beings until we can no longer stand the pressure and are forced, in a moment we may not even recognize, to let go and begin our own free fall to a course unknown.

Quote of the Day: I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister—anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me.

-Jim Burden, My Antonia

My Antonia. A classic Willa Cather novel.  A story of nostalgia and love, untenable because of time and distance.  A story of longing set against the backdrop of an unforgiving prairie.  A story of seeing life and love through nature, and nature through life and love.

In Antonia’s Gaze I hope to explore the themes of  life  and the vicissitudes of love through the lens of nature.  In doing so I will draw from some other sources of inspiration who incorporate the same thematic presences into their work; Barry Lopez; Edith Wharton; Thoreau; Whitman.

To go outside in order to go in, to understand oneself relative to all that surrounds us in nature; to see love in the rising sun or beauty in the hard cold of a fall rainstorm.  Through the medium of this blog, I hope to channel the questions in my heart and mind into understanding and peace using as a tool my relationship with the natural world.

Here goes nothing.