#3. I need an escape den: could it be this blog?
by storytellerisabel
Mom and I found at least 8 escape dens in the back woods last year. Our Red Fox used them to get away from predators and storms. But! She slept in the open. I need something like this too: both a way to escape bad guys and weather and also a way to emerge and do what needs doing. I’m thinking metaphorically. Although the idea of curling up under a hemlock with a furry tail or warm coat all around me? Not bad.
I Am Isabel the Storyteller 
That and Inauguration Day!
Good pandemic advice !
Isabel
I think nature is a doorway to solace. When I pay attention to the birds, a fox kit, the smell of the wind in a storm, the Saw Whet Owl in the Hemlocks, I’m in the moment and the sadness that is so overwhelming isn’t.
A poem I love explains this solace: “when despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound…I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Mimi
PS The poet is Wendell Berry. The poem is titled “The Peace of Wild Things”