I don’t remember your room, I remember the light in my room. I don’t remember your smell, only what your eyes did.

I remember reading Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase in high-school. She was a nun for most of the 1960s. The book is a chronicle of her difficult re-entry into secular life. A turning point for her was a reading of Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. It is a beautiful poem that asks the question of what to do when, over the common course of life, one finds that nature, in all its beauty, no longer suffices. I’ll save you the long quote. The short answer, for Karen, was “We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind.”

Nature has changed. It, of course, has not, but as a word, to us who made up that word, it has. Nature, as that place that once we could return to, attune to, emulate, has shifted. This we Know for sure. [+]