1.  It’s no secret I rolled into the weekend kinda blech. Nothing made sense, or maybe it was just that I couldn’t make sense of my current situation. Either way it was a whole lot of blech-y blechness going on.

2.  Sometimes that means hunkering down. Sometimes a good long nap and gobs of ice cream will knock out the fog. Unfortunately this wasn’t that sort of haze – this one would take a serious kick in the pants to clear out.

3.  Which is how I found myself heading to the woods on Saturday. Getting into nature almost always does the trick.

4.  Often just driving away from my house and toward the nature is enough to kickstart my butt which is what made Saturday extra weird. It’s not often I find myself cranky on the way to the country yet there I was, a super crabby pants who had no business being around other people. This was particularly unfortunate for the person trapped in the car with me but so it goes.

5.  So that’s it, right? We park the car, I tumble out into the nature, and poof! Everything’s right side up again. Except that’s not how it worked this time.

6.  I tumbled out – still cranky. I walked around – still cranky. I listened to the birds and looked at the blue, blue sky – still freaking cranky. Not good.

7.  We were there all afternoon and I gotta say, sometime around hour four I started to worry I wouldn’t get my mojo back before heading home. I honestly believed I’d lose my crap if I had to deal with ticks and mosquitos and dogs trying to roll in stinky wild animal poo without any sort of psychic payoff. It wasn’t looking good.

8.  That’s when I turned with the dogs and walked off into the woods.

9.  I walked until I couldn’t hear people anymore. I walked under tree cover then into sunlight again. I walked until the sharp fresh smell of pine swelled up and around me like a blanket.

10.  I walked straight into the nature until it swallowed me whole. Some combination of the woods cocoon and watching the dogs frolic finally – finally – lifted me right out of my funk. Nature for the win once again.