What really interests me

"Do you think that this place is paradise?" asks my youngest sister as we are walking in the woods this morning.
"Yeah, it really is for me", I answer. "I cannot imagine another life." We are walking in a glade where the palmettos fold into the cypress swamp. I know this place well, I know what grows there and I can name the plants I see. My eyes sweep the scene from the forest floor to the tree tops and I am looking and looking, invited to that sunny glade, to that thickness of Spanish needles and perhaps a sandy place where I will see the footprints of all the critters who were there last night.
I am always asking the young people I know what really interests them. If one knows this, they can take it from there. No one asked me when I was young what I really was interested in. But a discerning person might have known that as a child I spent hours in the woods picking plants and looking at them. In all the places I lived, it was the plants I remember. I know when the snowdrops would appear by the side of the first house I lived in up north, where the hollyhocks would bloom. I fell in love with a man who cared about the magic of fiddle heads just emerging from the snowy earth and I fell in love with his mother who knew where lady slippers could be found in the woods in the spring.
In so many places it has been the plants I remember. From the trees in the parks of Rome when I was a child, to the mosses in Turkey, to the large forests of France, to the wonderful blonde landscapes of northern California, and the wooded trails we hike in the south east, I have examined it all with such interest.
So, as my sister knows, I am happy to be here, constantly doing my own kind of research on the plants that are here in paradise.
Follow your star.