Why? Why walk or hike? Why make pictures? Why grow plants or talk to others about the value gardening and being outdoors?  Why share any of this?

As a child, the world out of doors is magic. Hours upon hours were spent whizzing down sidewalks, darting across streets, hands out wide, hair in the wind, shouts of glee, peddling faster as we flew up and down the curves and hills of the quiet cemetery streets. A gang of scraped knees, dirty faces, and worn-out shoes. There was no other purpose except to be outdoors and to play. Well, and to get out of our mothers’ hair.

Weather was never considered. Hot days brought out sprinklers and popsicles. Rain meant racing handmade paper boats along flooded curbs, and snow? Snow was tunnels and forts and epic neighborhood snowball fights and barreling down hills of white one wooden sleds.

Trees were fascinating creatures to climb and explore. Backyards were baseball and kickball fields. Empty, unmown lots became trampled trails for hide and seek. Entire square blocks and alleyways were our playgrounds. Bicycles and skateboards our time machines to the past, metaphorical horses and buggies in pretend bouts of cowboys and Indians.

Then, somewhere along the way it wasn’t cool to ride our bikes to school and backyard bases became overgrown and eventually disappeared altogether. Outdoors in our teens was spent at the pool, or on the beach, or in the parking lot of the local drive-in theatre. Weekends were spent at parties or scooping-the-loop.

The outdoors was no longer just a place to let our imaginations run wild. It was simply part of a different, more grown-up sort of play. The kind with boundaries and unwritten rules. If you wanted to play, you had meet certain criteria, you had to belong. Riding your bike with no hands, head back in the wind, screaming, was no longer acceptable behavior, and sports delegated to the appropriate, measured and marked fields.

As adults our time outdoors takes on an even more defined tone, limited to Friday evening barbeques and vacations, or weekends spent mowing the lawn and raking leaves. Our daily lives, lived behind concrete, wood and glass.

How did it all change so fast and seemingly without our knowledge or permission? What cruel fate directed that the joy of playing outdoors be slowly stripped away? That as adults we must now forever be locked into a world of work and responsibility with only momentary glimpses, if we’re lucky, of that once joyful feeling of nothing to do but ride this bike, hurtle this snowball and soak up this sun?

That, is my why for wanting to write and share my photographs and experiences outdoors. To encourage and remind you of the beauty and joy found just outside those windows and walls. There is so much power in connecting with nature; an unexpected transaction that takes place when we take time and step into it with no other motive then to just appreciate it.  

Photos included in this post were taken in Waubonsie State Park and Hitchcock Nature Center in the Loess Hills.