A hoverfly landed on my knee this evening as I sat in the grass, watching Mabel the pup run around the yard with a young tree I pulled from the garden, its chosen spot not conducive to prolonged life. While Mabel treated the tree like a chew toy, I observed the hoverfly. Such interesting little creatures, they are. Largely unafraid of humans, and entirely harmless, they will land upon your skin and suck at your sweat as though it is water. Which I suppose it is — just very salty water. Not exactly something that would quench our thirst but it seems to do them well.

I remember being fascinated with bugs as a kid. A fascination that must be deeply encoded within the DNA of boys. I never went so far as to pick up snakes or large spiders, bringing them into the house to the terror of my mother as many online videos display. Instead, I would watch with wonder, focusing my attention to the Pholcidae (daddy-longlegs) and the Lampyridae (fireflies). These were my favorites, and I regretfully recall being quite cruel to them.

My interest in bugs revolved around two primary questions: Why do they exist, and how do they work?

I don’t have a family home. We didn’t have one when I was a kid, and my parents were still together, and that didn’t change after they got divorced.

I started my life in one place, I spent most of my childhood in another one, finished my high school years in a third one (with a brief stint in a fourth one), and for the past decade or so I’ve been living up here, in my fifth one. I know the journey won’t end here and I’ll for sure move again, one day.

Every time I changed houses, I also moved to a different environment. These were not different houses in the same city. I started in a small country town, then moved to the city, then out again in a different small town country town, and now I’m up here, in this tiny little village nestled on the side of the mountains, surrounded by woods.

To last for a very short time.

I am fascinated by death. More specifically, the transitionary period during which something becomes something else. A lifeform moves from a state of living to a state of dying. A pop-up newsletter goes from active to inactive. The love felt for someone shifts from storge to pragma, from affection to convenience.

This deep intrigue was sparked while in Colorado with my father, back in August of 2023. I have continued to contemplate and read about death, in various manners, since then. Today, my interest has rekindled, the flame ignited though flickering, uncertain whether a breeze will snuff it out.

I am not a religious person. I grew up in a family that was non-religious. My parents decided to go against the grain of society—and also resisted family pressure—and decided not to baptise me when I was born. They did so because they rightfully argued that it I was the one who had to decide if I wanted to join the cult of Jesus. That position is not all that controversial now in 2025, but it was back in the 80s.

But my lack of faith doesn’t mean that I don’t find myself pondering the big questions about my own life and life in general. Why are we here? What am I doing here? What’s the purpose? Is there even one to be found?

Those are questions that countless people throughout human history have asked themselves, and I’m sure countless more will ask the same questions in the future. Or, given the current state of the world, they’ll likely ask ChatGPT for an answer to those questions.

I took the crackheads for a walk in the field this morning.

It’s not only the most accessible nature to me, being right aside of my house, but it’s also the best for them, as they can romp through the corn and grass, get covered in burs, and simply enjoy the freedom of being off-leash. There’s a lot of joy that bubbles up inside of me while I watch them. An immediate hit of dopamine that’s longer lasting, though not by much, than what’s achieved while doomscrolling.

And, man, that dopamine is greatly needed right now.

After a way too warm weekend, rain decided to show up last night, and today it was one of those lovely summer days, with loads of white clouds scattered across the blue sky, and temperatures low enough to allow for a hike during the day. And hiking I went. That in and of itself is not all that unusual: I think I went hiking at least 15 times already in August. The unusual part is that I wasn’t alone today.

“Well, actually Manu…” Alright, alright, I hear you: technically, I’m rarely alone because 95% of the time the insane dog is with me. What I meant to say is that this time another human was hiking with me, and that is because I took my mother out for a hike.

She wanted to hike a specific mountain that’s very close to her at a personal level, and since I am a wonderful—and modest—son, I was happy to accompany her on this journey. It’s a short drive from where I live, roughly 40 minutes, and the hike itself is a very modest one: just a bit more than 5km and some 330 meters of elevation gain. It’s the same mountain I hiked the other day at 3 in the morning, but we took another route this time around.

This missive is coming to you late, not because I procrastinated (for once) but because...well, I don't really know. For some reason, I simply couldn't send it out. I tried and I tried and I got frustrated until I thought to myself, "This really isn't important enough to get upset over." So, I wrote this and went to bed.

In a letter to Russel Vernon Hunter, the great Georgia O’Keeffe¹ wrote:

I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.

I was down at the river earlier today, looking for some relief from the unpleasantly hot weather. And contrary to what I usually do when I go down there with the dog—walking around a bit, letting him go nuts running up and down the woods and into the river—today I wanted to go swim a little bit.

The river near my house is more like a creek than a river, but it’s one of those lovely little creeks nested inside the woods where there’s always at least some water flowing and small ponds are forming pretty much everywhere along its path.

Some are quite small and shallow, perfect for my dog to walk into and then do absolutely nothing other than standing there cooling himself; he doesn’t like water and doesn’t want to swim, and I’m not gonna try to force him to do it because I care about the integrity of my limbs.

But others are big enough, and deep enough, to do a little swimming. And a little swimming is precisely what I did earlier today, while freaking out the dog in the process, which subsequently put him in zoomies mode. Anyway, that’s not what I want to write about, because what I do want to discuss is how I approach going for a swim down in the river.

I have never been one for sunsets. At no point have I looked to the sky and stared as blue turned to hues of red and yellow. There is simply nothing there to excite me.

When I was in Eastern Washington, photographing the rolling hills of the Palouse, a strong sunset was what many others desperately hoped for. The more colorful the sky, the better the photograph — or so many amateur photographers believe. Unfortunately, no matter how hard you try, you cannot polish a turd. If your composition isn’t any good with bad light, it won’t be much better with even the best of light. While everyone attending the workshop yearned for color, I looked for shadow. Specifically, the interaction between light and dark, the shapes made by such an interaction upon the hills. In hindsight, I suppose I have long gone against the grain, even if this is but one subtle example.

Perhaps my inability to properly appreciate a sunset is deeper than my disdain for color (one day I’ll attempt to analyze that but today is not that day). After all, a sunset may signify many things in life: the ending of a day, the ending of a life, the ending of light…. Put more simply, a sunset signifies the end.

For the first time in a while — likely since Washington last year — I noticed this evening’s sunset. Puffy clouds casting a pinkish hue, the light reflecting brightly. I wasn’t in a particularly beautiful area, just a back yard within a development, houses abundant and grass near-nonexistent. Yet something about the setting sun interested me.

When I picked August as a month for my hiking challenge, I knew it was going to be hard. Not because of the hiking itself, that’s not going to be an issue, but for the weather. Over the past month or so, it’s been all over the place. Spring has been rather cold, and then all of a sudden temperatures jumped up and summer was in full swing. Then they went down again. And up again. And down again. And now are up again.

I didn’t get to hike a lot over the past week because walking around with 35°C is not an enjoyable experience. Especially with the humidity that we often have here. And this is an especially tough weather for my dog, which is not built for this climate. And so we’re both doing what we can to adapt. We spend more time down on—and often in—the river. We try to go out very early in the morning or late at night.

That is another lesson nature taught me: you must adapt. There’s no bending nature to your will. When the warm weather hits, there’s not much you can do. You can either accept defeat, lock yourself inside with your fancy AC, wait for temperatures to go down, and give up enjoying nature. Or you can get creative and find ways to immerse yourself in nature even when it’s painfully hot outside. Or painfully cold. Or windy. Or when it’s raining.

Nature is not just sunny days with clear skies and a gentle breeze blowing in your face. It’s also getting pushed around by 100 km/h winds on top of a mountain. It’s getting rained upon and finding shelter in a dilapidated shack while out in the fields.

The weather this summer has been lackluster, to say the least. When we haven’t faced awful heat and draining humidity, we have been under a barrage of thunderstorms. Any attempts at properly enjoying the past few months have been squashed by these weather patterns. I’ve no motivation to head into the woods only to wade through a river of my own sweat. I most certainly won’t force Emmie the pup into joining, despite her proper adamance otherwise. She’s only fourteen pounds, after all, and I fear prolonged exposure to the heat, paired with miles of hiking, would do her only harm.

So, I have isolated myself inside, going out only when I am able to sit on the porch without immediately dehydrating. It’s a shame, seeing how I have also neglected my photography. There are projects I want to pursue but told myself it wasn’t wise to go into the woods. Before I knew it, it’s the middle of August and I’ve not gone camping once. Worse than last year, which I felt was quite poor at the time. If only I knew.

The harsh reality, if I allow myself to face it, is that I have avoided the woods simply because I wanted to. My desire to photograph has been largely nonexistent, and my personal life has been a whirlwind I cannot seem to escape from. Normally I would dive headfirst into nature in an attempt to assuage these emotions and heal. Instead, I chose to waste away.

There are many ways to move through space in general and in nature in particular. But none of them is as important as the simple and humble act of walking. And especially when it comes to nature, I truly believe that walking through it has some healing power. Walking itself is generally good for you, no matter where you walk. Modern life can be way too sedentary, and so using our muscles to move our asses around can do no harm.

But for me, walking in nature is more than just a physical exercise. Hiking the woods is therapeutic. It’s both a meditation and a therapy session. It’s also a moment of forced concentration, and that is especially true when I force myself to do “challenging” hikes.

But walking in nature is also a way to reconnect with the most basic ingredients of life itself. We evolved while walking around this planet. For the majority of our existence as a species, we moved through space by running—and we’re quite good at that—and walking. We walked through plains, up hills and down mountains. We walked through rivers and swamps. Humans managed to walk their way pretty much everywhere.

And sometimes you don’t even have to walk to go somewhere. Often, walking is seen as a way to go from point A to point B. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can just walk and see where life takes you.

My day was spent painting the bathroom, huffing the fumes, and my evening was spent playing pickleball, creating fumes of my own. By the time I arrived back home, ate, put the bathroom back together, and showered, I remembered I made no photograph nor wrote any words. I suppose I’ll start this off by sharing a photograph I finished recently. Taken on the final night of my beach vacation, it is already printed and framed, ready to be hung on the wall — the quickest turnaround for a photograph of mine in quite some time.

I suppose that’s simply because I knew, at the time of capture, exactly what I wanted.

While I edited a few other variants of this photograph — none of which were as good — I noticed writing on one side of the shop that mentioned something about go-karts. This, paired with today’s pickleball playing, got me thinking about outdoor recreation. More specifically, outdoor recreation that has negative consequences and harms the environment, often without us even thinking about these effects.

2:24 am

The alarm was set for 2:30 am, but my brain is anticipating this so much that I’m already awake. I’m lying in bed, no sound outside other than the crickets. It’s a lovely summer night.

2:30 am

Bzzz bzzz bzzz, the alarm on the watch on my wrist is vibrating. I’m already up, and have already put on both t-shirt and shorts. I can feel the fact that I slept only a few hours in my eyes: they are heavy. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m going for it.

I arrived home from the beach to my garden, dehydrated and suffering, a result of neglect from both man and nature. This is how it typically goes, every time I am away from home from more than a few days. A heatwave comes barreling through and my parents think little of the garden’s need for hydration. While I cannot directly blame either nature or my family for this — I do, however, ask them to please water my garden while I am away. It is neither of their fault for how the world is changing, for the devastation we as a species have caused.

My cucumbers and my sugar snap peas, my tomatoes and my jalapeño peppers — though they may struggle, they are likely to recover with my aid. May the same be said of the earth, or is the damage we have done irreversible?

My family owns around 100 acres of land in northern Pennsylvania, just outside a small town, nestled within the woods. A manmade lake resides, in which fish were stocked many years ago and now thrive. Grandma and Grandpa, paired with my father and mother and uncle, helped to make the property what it is today. They bushwacked the driveway in an old four-wheel-drive; they planted a pine grove (wrongly, I might add, but the effort is commendable) and they cleared land for fields, in which my uncle grew a crop or two, for a short period.

It was my first summer here, more than a decade ago. I didn’t know the place very well yet and I was still getting used to walking around the woods, especially at night. «Why do you go walking in the woods at night?» I hear you asking. Because why the hell not, that’s why. There’s a reason why woods and forests at night have always been part of folk tales: even places you’re familiar with and that you have walked countless times can suddenly look very different when walked at night.

But let’s go back to my first summer. My new neighbour had organised a small gathering to celebrate his wedding and so up I went, walking through the woods behind the house, on a road I have since walked hundreds of times. The sun was still up in the sky, the late afternoon light shining through the trees, one of the most enjoyable spectacles available in life.

I didn’t spend much time at the gathering; I was new here and didn’t really know anyone, plus I’m not exactly a party animal. There’s a reason why I walk around the woods at night. And so I said goodbye and headed back home, this time through a different, longer path. A normal road this time, not a trail in the woods.

I agree: Nobody should have to pay for nature. No one should be priced out of seeing the beauty of the world. To imagine a world where only the elite may benefit from the mental, physical, and spiritual effects of nature — that is not a world worth living in. I fear it is the direction we are headed, with America leading the charge. Something has to give.

That “something” is unclear, a mystery for which there is no solving — least of all in a quick and easy manner. National parks are grappling with this issue as we speak. How do we keep nature accessible to everyone while preventing those same people from destroying it? The last part is key. If we all respected our surroundings — and one another — the need for park rangers and volunteers and the like would be lessened. Still necessary, certainly, but for more important tasks than cleaning up litter.

This ties directly to Manu’s point: accountability would solve a great number of problems. Too bad very few are held accountable — by themselves, by the government, by friends and family. What can be done to amend this, if only in the realm of nature?

Since the name of this pop-up is “Natural Conversation”, I say we keep the conversation going because I have a few other thoughts I want to add to the topic of nature and its accessibility.

The issue of how to deal with the overcrowding of natural places is one that is all too familiar. I’m lucky enough to live in a corner of the country that is quite beautiful—at least according to my taste—but is also, and you’ll excuse my language, in the middle of fucking nowhere. But while here I can merrily go walk the woods without encountering a single soul (I see more deer than humans), that is not true if you leave my corner of the country and venture just a few hours west, up on the Alps.

Things are getting so out of hand that residents and land owners are protesting by putting up turnstiles on the trails. The idea itself is rather stupid since you can just walk around it, and it’s meant to be a protest on what’s happening in some of the shockingly gorgeous locations we have here, but it also raises some important questions about how to deal with this issue.

And it’s not just about the trash that is inevitably left behind by people who have no sense of decency (I’m a big proponent of bringing back corporal punishment for this type of stuff btw, but I want it to be creative: if you behave like an animal with no sense of decorum your punishment should be to go around walking on all four and picking up litter with your mouth) it’s also about the ramifications of making all these places inaccessible, for all intents and purposes, to the people who love them and respect them.

It appears I have broken the rule of "about 500 words," as what resides below this photograph is three times that. While enjoying the overcast weather, I seem to have gotten a bit carried away and have rambled significantly. The TLDR of it: I agree with Manu's statement that "the never-ending quest to make everything accessible to everyone" is destroying what makes nature so special. Rather than look at accessibility from a point of infrastructure, I instead believe the first step should be cutting cellular service (i.e., banning phones) in an attempt to get people to better connect with themselves and the natural world around them.

I’m sat here, thinking about Manu’s missive from yesterday, particularly when he said, “…but sadly, in our never-ending quest to make everything accessible to everyone, we have slowly turned secluded peaks into tourist attractions, easily reachable by cable car in exchange for money.” This made me ponder the idea of access and it’s role in the natural world, at which point my brain followed Alice and down the rabbit hole we went.

To think about access, we — at least those of us in the United States — must decide whether we are discussing public or private land, as there’s quite a bit of difference. Allow us to use the beach, where I currently am, as example. Despite being deemed “public land,” you must pay for a beach tag — between $10 and $35 depending on how long the pass is good for — or else you are told, not asked, to leave the beach. This, as well as the definition of “public land” — land that is “owned and managed by a government entity — conflicts with the idea of something being public, “open to or shared by all the poeple of an area or country.” To make this all the more confusing, both a city park and a beach are considered public land, but only the latter charges you a fee while the other runs off of tax revenue.

Peaks

If you ever took a personality test in your life, one of those silly ones often found online, that are nothing more than an endless stream of binary choices (Cats or Dogs? Sunrise or Sunsets? Waking up early or Staying up late?), you probably answered the inevitable question “Sea or Mountain?”.

The reason why those two are almost always the presented options is obvious, since they represent the two morphological extremes of what’s available to us human beings while staying with our feet attached to the earth. But in addition to being obvious physical extremes, inescapably linked to each other since mountains are measured starting at sea level, they also represent two very distinct ways to live life.

To me though, those two options don’t carry the same spiritual value, and I don’t think I am alone in this. There’s a reason why humanity has always searched for deeper meaning going upwards, towards the sky, summiting mountains. Moses didn’t take a stroll down to the sea to get his tablets; he ascended Mount Sinai. It’s the same reason why you can expect to find a cross or a small chapel pretty much on every peak throughout the Alps (and I suspect that’s true in other places as well).

The deadline looms.

A busy day, in the way every day is while on vacation. Not so much by doing a lot. More from existing in the heat of the sun. My energy quickly drains while at the beach, in particular. It’s my least favorite space to be. I find the beach pointless — to sit under the sun for hours at a time, drinking and listening to music, your skin burning. To visit for a day or two is one thing. To stay for a week is another.

The bay interests me much more this year. There’s something about a flooded land where bird and fish coexist. Where bugs of various sort do what they can to survive. I wish to explore more of this ecosystem, to learn more about what happens in this area as the beach across the way fills with people and noise.

The day is August 2nd. This is Manu writing in for the second of a thirty-part pop-up newsletter called Natural Conversation, inaugurated yesterday by my partner in crime Cody.

I’m out, walking the dog—I’m always out, walking the dog—and currently sitting on a bench, my back against the back wall of a centuries-old church, my sight set on the mountains right in front of me.

It’s another country, the one I’m looking at, but it feels all the same from up here. Mountains are mountains, trees are trees, the wind is blowing the clouds across the landscape, they see no borders beneath them. It’s a lovely view, and it’s the view you see in the picture right below.

Well, it’s 17:54 and if I don’t start to write something now, this little pop-up newsletter will be off to a perfectly typical start for me. (Manu would likely be upset with me, too, and he then may not finish my website.)

This is Cody Schultz, and I’m starting Natural Conversation off with a bit about noise.

Eric Bennett writes, “If our environment is quiet enough, our senses are amplified. But the environment we live in is not getting any quieter. The world is only getting louder” (Space, Stillness, Silence, 2024). If I hadn’t realized this before, I most certainly realized it today.