Kristine had led us into the woods.

She knew where to find it, where to find the real stuff at the bottom of the city.

Nature.

“I’ve had a shitty relationship with nature,” she said. “These days, it seems that nature is our most precious resource. We want to ‘save the environment!’, as the hippies say.”

I understood her pain. Humanity needs to use parts of nature to build all the things we need to save in order to save them.

Yet even as we plant trees to offset clear-cut logging, our salmon are grown in farms.

Kristine continued:

“When I was a kid, basically everything was nature. Mostly it still is, we’re in Canada anyway. But things were different back then. Canada wasn’t even a country yet. Did you know that the CIA used to kidnap people and do psychological experiments on them? That’s how it was in Canada. Trees and ice, nothing in the whole world but trees and ice.”

We stopped by a stream in a clearing as the sun began to set. The ragas of the music of Northern India each have a specific time and place they are supposed to be experienced in. There is a raga for a funeral in the winter, and there is a raga to go with the sun setting on a river in Spring. It resonates the very particle-wavelength properties of the matter and energy of this time and space.

I recorded the sound of the stream. I held the microphone close to the surface of the water, almost touching but not quite.

Kristine told us about a medical supply store that would sell us what we needed. The rest you could find in any Wal-Mart.