Lou Ureneck

“Solo work has always appealed to me. My favorite activities have been solo pursuits: fishing, walking, reading, and writing. Each of these activities has offered me antiphonal moments of effort and ease, concentration and relaxation. They also accommodated my tendency to daydream, and occasionally I caught myself taking a long mental walk around some idea that had occurred to me while I was working. The experience was entirely pleasurable, if not always productive. Antisocial? Maybe a little. Misanthropic? Not at all. I brought a better self to my encounters with others after a period of sustained solo work.”
― Lou Ureneck, Cabin: Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine

“And what was behind the harmony of the apples, of the pink lady’s slippers I found on my farther-ranging walks, or of the yellow mayflies and the trout that sipped them in nearby Great Brook? It seemed to me the result of the inevitable unfolding of laws laid down by the universe and embedded in the elements at hand: air and water, sunshine and earth. It was not by chance that the trees and leaves assumed their unique colors and shapes, or that small streams flowed into bigger streams, or that the fireflies lit their little lanterns of phosphorescence among the grasses at night. All of this was the consequence of what the universe had commanded. It was chemistry, biology, physics and some inexpressible something else mixed together into one thing, and that thing was inevitability. We respond to the grasses, the trees and the brooks because we sense a deeper truth in them. A brook cannot be false or a tree deceptive, and because we as a species grew up with them, and among them, we are essentially part of them and they of us. By what other means can we be said to be made? What is evolution but the interaction of our potential with the reality of nature? The apples, the leaves, the mayflies, the trout – they express the harmony of nature, as well as the miracle of nature. We are included in this miracle, and the surprise would be that a separation from nature would result in anything *but* alienation from our deepest and earliest selves, that a reconnection would be anything but a sense of coming home. All of us, it seems to me, seek to recapture the sensations and selves of our childhoods, and nature offers the best way back, to the freshest parts of our true and original essence.”
― Lou Ureneck, Cabin: Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine