outdoorsy oliver fan

I am a person who needs to be outdoors as much as possible. I sometimes wonder if this a mild form of claustrophobia. Working in an office, often an office without a window, for the past 28 years has nearly crushed my soul some days. When I leave the office, I want to be outside. I want to eat outside, walk outside, sit outside, read outside. If I have to be indoors, I want all of the windows and doors open. I sleep much better if I can hear night sounds or through an open window. I love to lie under a sky full of stars in the most open space around and be the smallest spec of being. This sometimes drives the husband to distraction. "Pleeeease let's sit outside!" I say on Saturday mornings at the coffee shop. He glares at the sun, glares at the hard chairs, glares at the inadequate table umbrellas. Sometimes he grudgingly agrees to my endless pleas to make use of the outdoor seating of every dining establishment. Not that he's not outdoorsy in some respects, too, but he is much less tolerant of less than perfect conditions.  Poet Mary Oliver, I think, is like me in this regard. When I read her poems, they speak to the deepest part of me and I understand them at a cellular level. This one is one of my favorites. 

Sleeping in the Forest
by Mary Oliver

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.