There's a particular look that settles on people around mid-November in Calgary. A slight resignation, an unconscious lowering of expectations for what the next four months will hold. The cold is part of it, but the cold isn't really what's happening. What's happening is the light, and what the body wants in response, and the way modern life is mostly arranged so that you can't have it.

There's a quality to natural environments that human environments rarely offer. Nature reflects you back without comment. A tree doesn't tell you to be more productive. A frozen lake isn't asking you to be okay. For most people, by adulthood, being seen has become tangled with being judged. The natural world offers something different — and what surfaces inside that quiet often isn't what people expect.