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+Every evening around 5 the thunder start in. You could set your watch by it. Except that there's no need for a watch up here. 
+
+s evening the thunder gods have conspired to produce something a little extra. Thor is pounding a little harder, Zeus throwing a little more than usual, flash and the rolling peel of sound dying off to the east, down the mountain side.
+
+The rain is soft and steady, the kind that leaves no puddles here in the forest, much to my children's disappointment. Here all the water is captured, held in a bed of rotting needles, leaves, and the roots of rice grass, false oats and mountain parsley, then lower the roots of gambel oak and snow willows, and finally somewhere deeper still the pine roots get what is left. No water is wasted. Nothing remains on the surface of things. 
+
+It is easy here to sink into the soil and disappear for a while, everything here is doing it, you are too. 
+
+The valley wall opposite our camp has disappeared in a rainy mist of gray white nothingness. The light is fading prematurely, leaving a shadowless forest where darkness fades in rather than falling like a shadow. It is silence save the soft pelting of rain and the call and response of two hardy wood peewees, seemingly unfazed by the storm. 
+
+And then some storm god throws another bolt and the silence is blasted apart.
+
+I am sitting here listening to the rain, feeling the pace of my chair sinking into the soil. It is a slow but steady rain, a slow but steady sinking. 
+
+I am listening to the rain because that is what you do when it rains.
+
+In every place the rain sounds different. 
+
+The rain that reaches down here does not do so directly, not much of it anyway. Most of it has hit at least one, probably hundreds, of pine needles on its way to the earth. These drops are small and soft because they have been broken up on their way down. By the time they hit the ground they are more alike than different, every drop having been similarly, but differently bounced through the pine canopy. The result is a steady even sound, broken up by the rougher splatter of rain coming through a gap in the canopy to land on oak leaves, or the split wood of the picnic table, or the roof of the bus.
+
+Somewhere out there is a forest. It's too dark now to see more than a few feet in front of me. There are two trees at the edge of what faint light the moon offers, locked away somewhere behind cloud. There's just enough glow that I can still make out the roughness of the tree bark and the curve of their trunks hint at the vastness of space behind them. Here next to the trunks the ground is still dry, whatever water has made it through the canopy is already down below the surface of the needles I'm lying on, staring up, trying to see the branches coming together above me.
+
+When you lie on your back and stare up at the trees running together up into the vastness of space and you can feel the planet spinning through the heavens and smell the warm fecundity of the soil, all the billons of microbes you're lying on churning their way through the seemingly endless supply of organic material of the forest, one day you. 
+
+You can feel that vastness of existence and the minute intimacy of existence at the same time here in the forest. And it is impossible to tease apart all the links between everything micro and macro, do not even try. In one way you are you, the you you experience, in another you are the joining together of cells of that found it advantageous to become parts of a whole rather than go it alone -- which one is you? That's the wrong question. Know that all of this is you. All those solitary cells within you are now too specialized to survive without the rest of you, they gave up their individuality to all you to exist. As has already been pointed out, hundreds if not thousands of years before we had the language of microbes and devil of the details by the tail, the wiser among realized that the biggest thing is in the smallest thing. 
+
+I think this is one of the principle realizations travel unfolds for you -- that there is no other. You are a part of a whole, interconnected and joined far more intimately to everything around you than you could ever hope to understand, though sometimes when you travel you feel it. You feel it when you are still somewhere for a while and start to sink into the soil. At the same time all is alien, your own 
+