Black Women and the Wilderness

I wanted to sit outside and listen to the roar of the ocean, but I was afraid.
I wanted to walk through the redwoods, but I was afraid.
I wanted to glide in a kayak and feel the cool water splash in my face, but I was afraid.

For me, the fear is like a heartbeat, always present, while at the same time intangible, elusive, and difficult to define. So pervasive, so much a part of me, that I hardly knew it was there.

In fact, I wasn’t fully aware of my troubled feelings about nature until I was invited to teach at a women’s writing workshop held each summer on the McKenzie River in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. I was invited to “Flight of the Mind” by a Seattle writer and her friend, a poet who had moved from her native England to Oregon many years before. Both committed feminists, they asked me to teach because they believe as I do, that