Gears grinding, steel catching high noon light in creaky crevices, hi-viz orange plastic cones and barriers peeking between branched brown and green grass. Wind rustling long reeds against each other, and workers yelling instruction from cherry pickers up overhead. Traffic running below, bumper to bumper beside the shore of the Hudson River. Airy patches of plantings fusing into a muddled base of patchwork color. And rising out of the shuffle of green: hard brick, poured concrete, glass and transom, brackets, beams, bolts, crumbled mortar, twisted wire fencing. Weather-worn train tracks encased in thick mud glint in the ground like exposed dinosaur bones.

The plants on the High Line are the same plants that grew on this old elevated train line soon after it began to wither into obsolescence. Their current orderly arrangement nods at human intervention, but the feeling remains: nature has taken this space back.

A walk along the Line puts you into a new loop of perception. A plant connects to a railing connects to the street and the buildings beyond. A tree points upward at the skyscraper hovering above. A shrub spreads, its triangular limbs directing your eyes toward the urban geometry around it. The sounds boomerang from wind in the leaves, to birds and people chirping, chattering, to the sudden boom of construction and giant metal claws grasping at endless asphalt.

There are no wheels allowed up here. Our slow, normal, human feet propel us down the snaking green path, forcing a reset of pace and adjustment in awareness: a welcome change against the rush and hustle of the city street below. Up here, you can see it all. You just have to slow down and look for it.

New York City’s High Line is located in the Chelsea neighborhood along the lower west side of Manhattan. It runs from Ganesvoort at the south and 34th Street to the north, with entrances every few blocks. They periodically close some of the entrances for updates and repairs, so check their website before heading over. It gets busy in the summer and in the early afternoon — for more privacy and magical lighting, try getting there early in the morning, or anytime during the winter (just wear a good quality coat)!

Looking for a way forward, I’ve been reading. So much reading. Some of it typed up by shaky, fearful hands. Some of it brassy and strident.

I’ve been trudging through digital collections of hate crimes, most performed under the name of our new President-Elect. Of course, these things were happening before Tuesday’s election results rolled in, but the difference is: now it’s being done in broad daylight, by people who are sick of being overlooked, people who are proud to take action under the name of their new leader. Also, now, the media is paying more attention. A lot of us are paying more attention, I guess.

I’ve read inspiring captions on Instagram, and impassioned longform essays, and transcripts of podcasts and interviews. I hoped the words would come, I hoped the reading would help put my own thoughts in some sort of coherent order. But they didn’t. I stayed silent. I hid in my home. I fretted. I called my family.

This morning I read Heather Wells Peterson’s piece on the purpose of art in our current moment of unrest. I think my mind was too clouded to fully absorb the stoically motivational thesis, but a short paragraph did jump out at me:

A friend of mine, a black poet living in Florida, hasn’t been able to write a poem in months. He’s worried they’ve stopped. And I understand that — sometimes art isn’t enough, or everything else is too much.

This moment, this feeling that the world has knocked itself off course, has left us rushing to catch up and drag it all back into equilibrium. But I’ve been pushing myself to consider that this is the way the political right has been feeling for the past eight years. As so many of us have been hazily going through our days, quietly proud and bolstered by the existence of that beautiful black family in the white house, the other half of the country has been angry, fearful, frustrated that their voices and values have gone ignored.

I’m wrestling with my fear of what a population of emboldened xenophobes are capable of. And I’m wrestling with the knowledge that matching their fear with my own won’t push this country closer to mutual understanding and an equitable distribution of opportunity and justice. While I cannot sympathize with their violence and hostility, I do acknowledge that rejecting dialogue is what brought us to this moment. This is an uncomfortable place to be, where my thoughts scare me as much as what I see happening in real time in the news. But change doesn’t happen accidentally, you have to want it. Change isn’t engendered by hope alone, we all have to fight for it. The events of the past week have radicalized us all. Whether we like it or not, whether we understood what we were wading into, we’re all in the water now.

Earlier this year, I watched a wave of acknowledgment ripple through my online community as the national police force waged a one-sided war against unarmed black people. I watched people showcase their temporary solidarity and then quickly return to their travel tips and gardening tutorials. It all felt hollow, rootless, convenient. The current anger I see in protesters’ eyes, the hand holding and cries for reform, I hope it sticks around. I know that what we’re facing is a lot, but I hope we all keep eyes trained on the long road we have ahead of us instead of turning back toward acceptance and unearned ease.

I look forward to the day when my poetry returns to me, when the beauty of the earth is what I see first, not the exponential terror its human inhabitants can spawn. This planet and its beautiful diversity of life is still my first priority, and I still think time spent outdoors can be deeply healing (an excellent, timely example). But I also want my art to inspire action, not just provide escapism or soothe readers into complacency. So the posts will continue, and I’ll continue to look for ways to imbue them with politics, and real talk, and meaning.

A web outlet recently dubbed me ‘The Green Dreamer’. Well, I’m awake now. I hope you are too.

When I went on the campout at Northerly Island back in August, an REI staff photographer asked if I’d be comfortable with him shooting some photos of me for a possible member portrait on their website. Lo and behold, a few months later, the portrait is finished and published! Check out my feature, posted along with some of my photographs from the past year. Let me know what you think!

When I walked through Humboldt Park during the famous snowpocalypse of 2011, the drifts came up to my waist. When we all lived in nearby Ukrainian Village, two friends and I bundled up in several layers and stumbled through uncleared sidewalks and alleyways. Parked cars were buried in snow up to their rooftops. We crossed Western Ave and into the Humboldt Park neighborhood, usually electric with action and conversation. That day, it fell silent, as silent as the Park itself. Everyone was still inside, huddling beneath blankets and beside space heaters. In the Park, a lone figure trudged through the snow off in the horizon. We wandered through quiet, covered fields — in awe of the overwhelming whiteness, ice falling into our high boots, fingers frozen and balled inside our pockets.

Last week, on an unexpectedly warm fall day, I walked through Humboldt Park again. I wore a short sleeved shirt. No socks. The sun beat down on the top of my head, fingers fell lazily at my sides, not balled up like they instinctively do in cold weather. It was me and a crowd of other west siders, strolling, sitting, fishing, bartering, and jamming with their dueling salsa bands, speaker volume turned all the way up.

I’ll never get tired of the sights and sounds of people loving being outside. That day, as I walked through Humboldt Park, I fell in love over and over. With families watching the ducks float in the lagoon. With weekend warriors stringing up portable hammocks between the trees. With grillers, runners, strollers, and salsa dancers, shoes off, feet twirling in flattened crabgrass. And all around us, the angled sun pierced through gaps in the turning leaves, tinting the crowd in swatches of orange and warm yellow.

In fall, as in summer, the pace can be frantic, there’s an impulse to take advantage of the weather “while it’s still nice.” And it can all feel very rushed, if we let it. We push ourselves to go outside so at the end of the season we can say, I was there, and I didn’t let it pass me by. But pressure and pleasure make bad bedfellows. I’ve realized the secret to enjoying fall is in refusing to take heed of the clock. It’s in recognizing each day for what it brings, releasing expectations on ourselves and on the world around us. The secret is in loving each leaf when it’s there, and accepting when its time to fall has come.

So on the warm fall day when I walked through Humboldt Park, I didn’t think once about the chill I felt in my bones during my snowpocalypse wander five years before. I didn’t dread the inevitable day when the trees would all lose their color, when the lagoon would freeze over, and the sky would turn soft and gray. I didn’t preemptively mourn the retreat of the autumn revelers, imagining the pull of itchy wool against their arms and the track of salted footsteps up their wooden front stairs.

I just watched, and walked, and enjoyed the day for what it was.

Humboldt Park is a gorgeous 200 acre park on the near west side of Chicago. It holds a nature sanctuary and bird/butterfly habitat, as well as many areas for protected native prairie plants. This isn’t generally a park to visit if you don’t want to interact with other people, but I think that’s part of its beauty. Come here to people watch, to joke with the fishermen, to help a wayward toddler back onto the trail, to gobble down a picnic of jibaritos that you bought down the street, and to enjoy the sights and sounds of a well-loved public park. Humboldt Park is easily accessed via public transit: the #72 North bus, #52 Kedzie/California bus, and #70 Division bus all drive right by.

I entered Central Park at 59th Street, Columbus Circle, a tangle of curved roads and angry cab drivers. I’d already walked a fair amount, almost half the length of Manhattan from the lowest end of Chelsea, all the while surrounded by traffic. The relief washed over me when, from the street, I could finally see the crowd of trees hovering above the cars. I’d been to Central Park before, but only on brisk walks, crosstown buses, and vicariously in almost every movie set in New York City. On this day, a hot, cloudy one in mid-August, I planned to wander.

Green was everywhere I looked. In Central Park, the view are layered: slices of green are stacked vertically, topped with beautiful architecture built of stone, glass, and steel. The bodies of water, victims of giant summer algae blooms, sparkled green too, almost mimicking the park’s great lawns and meadows.

The Bethesda Terrace provided a place for a much needed rest. Hundreds of people circled the fountain holding selfie sticks at arm’s length, while hundreds more shuffled through the lower passage, listening on as an opera singer’s shimmering voice echoed against the tile and sandstone.

Walking along East Drive led me to Iphigene’s Walk and The Ramble, a central area of the Park that could by easily mistaken for a deep, quiet, well-paved forest in a town far from NYC. The air smells different here, damp and clean, the tree canopies shade wanderers from the harsh sun and provide a place to escape the crowds that are inevitable in more well-worn areas of the park. Birds and squirrels rustled in the brush and darted across the path. Passersby nodded a silent greeting. A young couple sat along the banks of The Lake and gazed out over the rippling water.

After spending some time alone in The Ramble, I made my way back to the city, back to where people jogged and sauntered, talked and texted, yelled and laughed. I watched the world walk by, people of every background and interest, people who’d lived their whole lives in New York, and people who had traveled across the world to be there for one day.

I sat for a while, feet exhausted from the full day of walking, and looked on at a man with two sticks and a string creating giant, human-sized bubbles. Iridescent and amorphous, the bubbles reflected the surrounding trees in wild, psychedelic colors. They grew and caught the breeze, drifting a ways before popping and disappearing. Every head turned, people stopped to enjoy the show, they chatted with their neighbors, and then left, continuing on to different corners of the park, and eventually, back out into the city.

Central Park is the largest park in the city of New York, one of the largest public parks in the country, and a wildly magical place no matter the time of year. It is, as the name suggests, centrally located and very easily accessible on foot or on public transportation from just about every corner of Manhattan.

There’s a little patch of wild nature in Chicago, I recently discovered.

The plants are allowed to grow as they had for years and years before we began to pave and farm and coax green from the ground and each others’ pockets.

The trees are allowed to reach far into the sky, and crack and break, falling to the ground to be reclaimed by the soil.

The grasses are allowed to sway in the strong breeze, hiding vast numbers of bugs, clicking and buzzing deep in the brush.

The water that collects is allowed to dry and swell with the patchy storms and dusty droughts that punctuate this city’s long summer.

Even the areas built for humans are meant to observe and support life.

This was a green place, this bit of nature that I found. But it won’t be for long. It will change with the seasons, turning brown in October, and white in December. But it will change only on its terms.

There’s a certain energy to a plot of land that is left to grow and shrink as it wants. It makes a specific sound, smells a certain way, feels different under foot. When you slow down, sit, watch, listen, you can pick up on the cues being sent back and forth. Your eyes readjust to the lights and darks and the shades in between, finding the life that slips along in the shadows, usually right beneath our noses.

North Park Village Nature Center is a breath of fresh air on the far north side of the city, near the intersection of Pulaski and Peterson. It’s a beautiful place to wander through multiple ecosystems, including forests, prairies, and wetlands. They offer a full schedule of classes and programming for kids and adults and are open seven days a week, 10am-4pm. The Nature Center is easily accessed by public transportation using the #84 Peterson bus or the #53 Pulaski bus. There is no cost for entrance.

Back on Labor Day, surrounded by all that loud, vivid green, I was almost able to drown out the “last day of summer” whispers. Summer was alive and present. The sun was still out. The day was hot and muggy and the cicadas were screaming. People still strolled sleeveless, sockless.

As we wandered through deep woods, the first step on our journey back to the city, I saw it on the edge of a row of bright green oaks and alders. Fall. It was a little spindly thing with lime-veined pink vellum for leaves. It grabbed the early evening light, and radiated a nostalgic warmth. It stuck out, a lone blast of color and crunch against a soft green backdrop. I wondered about this little tree. About the accelerated calendar it must have been using. About the singular forces that made it begin to turn so much earlier than the others.

I kept walking, leaving fall behind, thinking it was an anomaly of the far northern suburb we had ventured into, something to deal with later. I reentered the city, blindly expecting summer to blaze on. But, sitting in my living room staring out at the treetops I’d grown so used to these past few months, I saw it again. Fall. I noticed the leaves of the honey locust across the street. A canopy of the brightest, boldest green whose uppermost leaves had now begun to yellow. Its bits of confetti gently released their hold on the branch, almost indiscernible for those not paying attention. And I realized, I hadn’t been paying attention.

For all the walking and wandering and gazing and thoughtful considering I’d been doing this summer, my eyes had been closed. I saw what I wanted to and ignored what I didn’t. I’d quietly trained myself to take in the good, the green, the growing — and avoid the signs of change and transition. The fading color, the curling edges, the going-to-seed. Summer is on its way out, and fall is humming its arrival.

Change is something I’ve never been good at accepting. I resist it, averting my eyes and ignoring the inevitable. I crave stability but rarely attain it. Out of control, hovering just shy of the unknown, the anticipation of the changes to come tighten in my stomach.

For the gardener and greenhunter, these last days of summer feel a bit bewildering. Just as I had settled into summer, I now feel its warmth waning: an embrace that always ends too soon. Outside, things are changing everyday, usually signaling the end of something that had been beautiful to behold. But this year I heard a ringing in my ear. The echo of something I had already, somewhere in me, known to be true:

Don’t think of it as the end of summer, think of it as a season of new beginnings.

It’s a lofty task for someone who generally resists change by any means necessary. But in the spirit of new beginnings, I’ve started to look for signs of fall like I do with spring, spotting and uncovering the hints the living world has left around me. It’s still a slow shift — a flutter of yellow, pointed tips turning red, crisp brown wedged within curb — but I see it now, everywhere.

I don’t avert my eyes. I don’t avoid the signs. The exact shape and color and sound and smell of it is still unknown, but fall is coming. It’s ok to not know exactly what’s on the other side of all this change. And I’m working hard to welcome it.

Back in August I split town and spent a week in New York City. I stayed on the edge of Brooklyn and Queens and caught up with good friends, 99% of whom now live there. I wandered for miles through wild gardens, biked a surrey around Governors Island, lingered in the aisles of heavily air conditioned stores, drank delicious tiny coffees, and ate a bagel everyday.

With each small adventure, I felt myself growing fonder of this crazy place that had previously intimidated and overwhelmed me. I found the softer side of the city, the lush green underbelly that often gets overshadowed by miles of steel infrastructure and concrete facades. I felt tested and stretched, but I also felt welcomed and comfortable. The streets were walkable, the people were kind, and the food was fantastic. What more can I need?

I’ll have several more posts coming up about a few of the New York green spaces I fell in love with, but in the meantime, I’ve got some suggestions for your next trip to NYC. Check out the New York City Green City Guide and let me know if you have any favorites to add to my list!

We’ve been taking an annual trip to the Chicago Botanic Garden for a few years now. The Garden’s hundreds of acres unfurl into an infinite number layered views, gushing with color and texture. I’ve spent many, many hours exploring the individual themed gardens, walking as many of the crushed gravel paths as I could, maximizing my time in this planted oasis. But every year, I find more. More hidden corners of the grounds, more plant combinations, more sights for these sore city eyes.

We always take our trip out to the Gardens on Labor Day. The bonus day, third day in a three day weekend nestled well inside the warm weather season. This year, it felt like half the city of Chicago had the same idea. The gardens were full. Multi-generational families lingered on bridges, beers clinked in the grill patio, and rows of strollers lined up outside the butterfly tent.

There were thousands of people exploring the gardens, bickering, laughing, sharing seating space on wide, flat rocks. We listened in on friends catching up, a wife telling her husband her cheeseburger-and-red-wine order, mothers and sons giggling about recently made memories. I heard different languages, many of which I couldn’t identify. I saw white linen robes and jewel-toned saris billowing with the wind, and baseball caps shielding eyes from the late day sun.

We all wandered from garden to garden. Inspired by the same call to leave our homes and enjoy a day off together, outside. We all sighed in relief under the shade of a tall tree. We all inhaled deep when we passed the scent throw of a flowering plant.

I enjoy spending time in beautiful gardens because I love the plants. The way they look and smell and feel. Their patterns, the way they splay their leaves, the way they catch sun and shade throughout the day. But my favorite part about the CBG might be watching how other people interact with the garden. You don’t have to know everything about horticulture or garden design or biodiversity to be able to enjoy the space. You just have to use your senses.

From afternoon until evening, I watched the Garden come in and out of focus. It shone as scads of eyes grazed over its hills and ponds, picking out particular plants as singular objects of attention. And then it faded into the background, sparkling like lens blur, behind the faces and stories of all its visitors.

The Chicago Botanic Garden is almost 400 acres of beautifully planted gardens located in Highland Park, a north shore suburb of Chicago. I get there using the Metra Union Pacific North line, which costs about $6 roundtrip. Get off at Braeside and walk 20 minutes to the Visitors Center where you can get your bearings and plan your route. My favorite stops include the Japanese Garden, the Council Ring on Evening Island, the Fruit & Vegetable Garden, and the Prairie. I’ve only ever been to the CBG in the summer, but it’s open year-round and I imagine it is stunning during any season. Parking costs $25-30, but entrance on foot or by bike is free.

I recently got back to Chicago from a long-awaited vacation to New York City. I spent most of my time in NYC doing all my favorite things: going to parks and plant stores and eating my weight in delicious vegetarian food. Needless to say, it’s taking a while to get back into the swing of things here in the Midwest.

In an effort to bring some of that vacation feeling back with me, some friends and I recently took a long lunch and headed up to Gethsemane. This shop is a gardener’s paradise with a succession of yards and greenhouses showcasing perennials, annuals, indoor plants, trees and shrubs, garden furniture, pots, and tools. The place takes up a whole city block and during weekends in summer, it’s absolutely packed with people. People who love plants, people who buy plants, beginning gardeners, experienced collectors, sellers, experts, and everyone else.

A well-stocked plant store at the height of summer is a beautiful thing. On the day of our visit, Gethsemane was warm and vibrant, but mercifully calm — its typical throng of eager shoppers conspicuously absent. So we got to wander the hallways of this quiet green temple in peace. I wasn’t really in the market for more plants. I’m trying to hold back on spending for a while until my wallet recovers from its time in New York. But I can always browse. And browse I did.

Gethsemane is located in the northside neighborhood of Andersonville. It’s fairly easy to reach via public transportation: the #50 bus drops off about a block away. While you’re up north, I’d strongly recommend a stop at the nearby Middle Eastern Bakery where you can buy all the falafel, hummus, and bulk spices your bag can carry.