Sahil Jain shares about his love for foraging in nature.
I paused for just a moment, to hear the semi-rhythmic chipping of a woodpecker. As the crunch of my footstep faded, stealth rustling echoed in the background. There’s a different rush when you see a deer in the wild, and not in the zoo. I’ve wondered why. Is it the thrill generated from situational mind games – do I move first or does it?
A twig snaps, and with one leap it’s out of sight. What’s wild about the wild? Unpredictability – that’s the adrenaline rush that comes from the great outdoors. For someone who feels suffocated by the confines of structure – from school schedules to Google meets, from biology taxonomies to cooking recipes, nature offers me unkempt stimuli to think and live outside of these boundaries. But my connection to the outdoors is not above ground. My connection is the ground.
I love to forage. Scouring the ground, I scavenge between the oat straw, marveling at the golden grass that invades and shapes the brown hills of our Golden State, pondering the nature-scape legacy crafted by the ancestral and indigenous. I’m humbled by the way that humans have gathered food and healing wisdoms from nature. Nature prompts questions – awakening our physical and mental reflexes.
I bend down low to pluck the honeysuckle for a moment of sweet bliss. You have to suck the nectar out of the plant stem – sometimes the ones I choose are dry. Curious about how to choose successfully, I make field notes, observing the stages of flowering. After a year, I’ve nailed it. In nature, it really is the thrill of the chase. That’s what makes the wild, wild. With a Perspective, I’m Sahil Jain.