It’s the power of play

The vast unscripted

And the sunlit day

That gets our spirits lifted

It crashes upon us, washes and dons us:

Beings belonging in beauty.

It was next to Captain Bull, Saturday, where my girlfriend and I opened the floodgates and were swept into beautiful oblivion. Gaia granted us an afternoon of warm sunny splendor, so we trekked to Manassas National Battlefield Park, where we would shed the shiz kopf winter’s been dealing us.

Using unrivaled dexterity, most likely acquired from youtube workout exercises, Ileana Vink dekes, dodges, and ducks amid the bramble of branches blocking a tiny wooden bridge at Stone Bridge Loop Trail, Manassas National Battlefield Park.

If you’re anything like me, and trust me you probably are, because people are more similar than they ever lead onto, than you forget about how stimulating it is to be outside. You forget how the sound of grass, plasticity of mud, and warmth of the sun rockets you into old memories, which launch you into new memories, and all of it sends your life whirling into motion.

Nature provides this crazy automatic recharge. It re-energizes people who are spending too much time being forced into focusing.

There’s a spankin’ brilliant passage in Richard Louv’s book “Last Child in the Woods” that talks about how too much directed-attention (time spent where your forced into focusing on something, like being on the computer, watching tv, slaving away at work, or perishing in the classroom) leads to “directed-attention fatigue.”

The best cure to this fatigue is finding an environment where attention is automatic and not forced – an environment strong on fascination. The cool thing is, “the fascination factor associated with nature is restorative and it helps relieve people from directed-attention fatigue.”

Power Up: The ground hog did not see his shadow, so perhaps spring is upon us.