At one of my previous jobs, when I needed to escape I would cross the street and go to the bookstore. My boss and I would sometimes claim we went there to do research, or tell each other we were going to refresh and be inspired. More often than not, we were just going there to get away. When the cubicle walls felt too close, the fluorescent lights too harsh, the coworkers too demanding or out of touch, there was the bookstore.

I eventually left that job and, soon after, that bookstore went out of business. But the need to escape remains. So I walk through the park. I usually do it in the morning, when I’m feeling hopeful and there’s still some brightness in the sky. Some days I do it in the late afternoon when the minutes are moving at half their usual speed and the sun, hidden behind thick cloud cover, speeds toward the horizon. I do the walk everyday, and I let the shadows and colors and textures distract me. It’s not always pretty, but it’s always there, and it’s always changing.

On the coldest days, the ground is as hard as pavement, indistinguishable from sidewalk or igneous rock. It’s a quiet trek, occasionally sprinkled with the darting eyes and hurried hellos of passing strangers. The abrasive rhythm of snow crunching underfoot crowds out the motorized whizz of cars and the hiss of the kneeling Montrose bus. Cloudy rings of bright blue ice gleam, surrounded by thinned patches of yellowing grass.

When a thaw moves in, solid ground that’s pitched and angled from last week’s frozen footsteps starts to give again. Tiny chunks of dirt and slush clump and creak beneath heavy steps. Bunches of shredded leaves huddle near wide tree trunks, the weak brown shards crushed flat under the speckled sun. The great green gazebo spreads wide its shadow over broad drifts of snow.

As the weather turns briefly, blindly toward spring, the field becomes an obstacle course. The rain comes, the ground swells with water, and the dirt puffs up into mud. Animals return to drink, and search for food. I tread lightly over rooted sod, careful not to step too hard and twist it clean from the earth. Floor-bound nests of fallen twigs support my weight and keep me from sinking ankle deep into black sludge, my rubber soles sucking against the wet earth with each step.

And the next day, the freeze returns. The melt, once again, hardened into solid crystal.

Instead of thinking about the cubicle walls or the fluorescent lights, these walks keep me in real time, reacting with and against the landscape. I’m learning why some people hike the same trails year after year, this small stretch of public park as my teacher. Even near a tangle of busy intersections, among the roar of traffic and constant construction, I can hear the earth breathe. I can see it sigh.

One day soon, we’ll turn toward the sun and the land will open up to welcome a new season. It will push up new sprouts and nurture them on their way to becoming great trees. It will embrace the eager picnickers who rest in new grass and pull corks from chilled green bottles of white. But the park, even in winter, shows me something new. It shows me that change doesn’t have to wait until spring. I walk by it everyday.

Welles Park is a big, beautiful park located in Lincoln Square on the northwest side of the city. Summer brings giant, lush fields (often filled with hundreds of summer camp kids). In winter, it’s much emptier and the perfect place for quiet and contemplation. It’s well worth a visit any time of year.

There’s a reason why the Garfield Park Conservatory shows up on so many Chicago travel guides (including mine!). Actually, there are about a million reasons why, but all those reasons are really wrapped up in one moment. Distilled down, the concentrated essence of what this place is and does for us is simple.

Go there in the winter. On a horrendously frigid day, preferably in the middle of hard, gray February, open the door to the Palm House and remember what it feels like like to breathe. Recall that the color green comes in infinite shades and shapes. Slowly peel off your layers of down and wool and let the humidity in the air (remember what that is?) smooth the creases another endless winter has embedded in your face.

If you’re lucky, find an open bench to sit on and watch the people, children, couples hand-in-hand, wander down the pathways. Dazzled smiles on parade, each in awe that something so beautiful can really exist, here, now. If you planned ahead, eat your packed lunch of cheese sandwiches and clementines and forget, just for a moment, about the sharp wind waiting for you on the other side of the glass walls. Promise yourself, and anyone within earshot, that you’ll return once a month until the trees bud again. Once a week! Everyday if you know what’s good for you.

This place is magic any time of year. In the summer, you can wander through acres of outdoor urban plantings, vertical gardens, and working farms. In spring and fall, you can search for narcissus bulbs sprouting from the hard earth, or leaves changing color in the mighty Hawthorn grove. Visiting the Conservatory in winter, however, teeters on brushing up against the divine. That first step into the first climate controlled room restores your faith in life, in the belief that at some point in the future, we’ll have warmth and growth again. That one day, clouds won’t shield the sun for weeks on end, fingertips won’t always be numb and blue, sidewalks won’t always be one boot wide, chiseled down to tiny canyons of icy snow and salt.

Chicago can be a rough place for a plant lover. The growing season is lush and welcoming and almost makes you forget what the other side of the coin looks like. Once the air goes cold for good, indoor refuge is the name of the game. The Garfield Park Conservatory will grant you sanctuary. Pack that picnic, wear some layers, bring a book, and enjoy.

The Garfield Park Conservatory is located a short walk from the Conservatory-Central Park Drive stop on the CTA Green Line. Open 365 days a year, admission is free.

“While we are able to do so, let us note the distinction. A park is a managerial unit definable in quantitative and pragmatic terms. Wilderness is unquantifiable. Its boundaries are vague or nonexistent, its contents unknown, its inhabitants elusive. The purpose of parks is use; the earmark of wilderness is mystery. Because they serve technology, parks tend toward the predictable and static, but wilderness is infinitely burgeoning and changing because it is the matrix of life itself. When we create parks we bow to increased bureaucracy and surveillance, but when we speak for wilderness we recognize our right to fewer strictures and greater freedom. Regulated and crowded, parks will eventually fragment us, as they fragment the wilderness which makes us whole.”
– Wayland Drew

The word “wilderness” is likely to evoke about a million different thoughts and images. Everyone’s got a slightly different version, either experienced first-hand, or dreamed up in some corner of their imagination. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced true wilderness, the kind of wild space that makes you forget there’s an alternative. At this point it feels almost impossible, a living environment that’s unknowable and borderless, one that edges on dangerous, or that we haven’t even touched or taken it upon ourselves to maintain.

Wilderness has become a popular word lately. It features in many trending hashtags and hangs on the pages of blog posts and well designed quarterly magazines. It pops up in print and digital advertisements and beckons from within high budget SUV and credit card commercials. It’s a bit of everywhere, but it’s still something very few of us experience. The mystery and inaccessibility may hold our imagination, and we may be inspired to hike out in search of our own brush with wilderness, but where are we actually going when we head into the wild?

In the United States, 80% of us live in urban environments. That’s a huge number of people who likely have more experiences with the outdoors via Google Image Search than they do in real life. We’re deeply separated from nature, both physically and psychologically. The distance grows greater every day as cities expand up and out. Everyday, concrete and steel facades reach higher heights and spread farther into formerly natural areas. We’re constantly encroaching on and compromising spaces that are necessary for plant and animal populations, and are therefore systematically reducing the portion of Earth that is truly “wild.” To bridge the gap, technology has advanced to allow us to take virtual tours of national parks and nature preserves. The distance between us and a backcountry hike is equal to the amount of time it takes us to search a tag on Instagram.

But we all know the digital experience isn’t enough. Looking at a photograph of a mountainside at dusk — no matter how beautiful or perfectly composed — doesn’t even come close to standing there in real time, inhaling the scent of junegrass and listening to the buzz and chatter of the creatures around you. So we seek out the wilderness. We seek to immerse ourselves in it. Millions of us, and more every year, drive, fly, hike, ski, and climb to the places we picture when we close our eyes and imagine “quiet.”

Maybe true wilderness doesn’t exist anymore; the kind that’s dark and deep and lonely and frightening because you don’t know if you’ll make it back and even more so because you don’t know who you’ll be once you get there. Or maybe wilderness is whatever place that brings us closest to that type of experience. Maybe it’s the place where we have enough space and time to ourselves that we can look both outward and inward with equal amounts of terror and courage.

It seems that wilderness isn’t a specific number of feet away from the trail, or a quota on the number of other people who have accessed a protected area. Wilderness is what you make it. It’s somewhere distant and remote, and it can also be the local park down the street. It’s somewhere that expands your understanding of nature and your place in it. It’s somewhere that makes you question yourself. It’s somewhere that makes you whole.

Another Green City Guide is now live! This past summer, I took a quick trip out to Colorado — and fell in love with it, just like everyone said I would. I’ve put some of my favorites together into a new city guide. Take a look: Green City Guide: Boulder & Denver

A Midwestern snowstorm is the closest I’ve ever come to living in a black and white photograph. Depending on the severity of the weather system, I feel like I’m inside the grainy halftone photo that accompanies an appropriately dramatic headline. I’m the tiny figure, hooded and huddled in a blindingly lit bus shelter, surrounded by swirls of white dust, back to the wind. I’m the speck of black in the whiteout.

There’s very little color in this world. The sky, once vibrant and blue, is now dull and completely white. Contrast has faded and shadows that were strong and rich have all lost their depth. Weeks or sometimes months pass before we realize we’ve forgotten what sunlight looks like, or that it was a thing we once enjoyed in abundance. We’re in the midrange now, gray and flat. This is winter.

I know there’s beauty in this season, just as there is in all the others, but here in the middle of the city, it’s harder to find. Here snow blows like a strong gust of wind, sideways, and often mixed with icy sleet and aggressive hail. As green as Chicago is in the summer, winter’s overwhelming lack of green is always a cruel surprise that I never feel quite ready for.

I try to look around with different eyes. I stare deeply at the angled geometry of bare tree branches, finding the tops and bottoms of every split and fork. I keep an eye open to the marbling of crunchy snow on sidewalk, the sandy and silty mix of shades underfoot. I watch as car tires kick up thick pancakes of snow, and as puffs of breath float into the air, little clouds released by those of us who are unlucky enough to be stuck outside.

In the street, the fallen snow is hardening into solid drifts, and the trees are sinking deeper into their annual slumber. Squirrels are digging frantically for the morsels they hid away just a few short weeks ago and crows stand sentinel, squawking wildly and pushing a sharp rhythm into the cold silence. Giant opaque icicles are forming, slowly, steadily growing longer and wider with every successive freeze and thaw.

I know there’s a beauty to it. I just have to look closer to find it.

My Green City Guides are starting to trickle in — I figured I’d use the deep freeze that we’re finally sliding into to reminisce about the places and plants I’ve seen in the past recent while. Kicking things off with the one I know best, the Chicago Guide is now live.

The day after the winter solstice — the shortest day of the year and the official start to winter — we watched a torrential downpour gush from our roof and splash soil and last summer’s coriander seeds all over our porch. An hour later, sunshowers. And an hour after that, a brilliant blue-orange sunset lit up all the west-facing greystones. That night, great gusts of wind shoved against our rickety double-paned windows and bowed huddles of basswood trunks. After midnight, when the winds died down, a heavy gray mass of clouds settled over the pitch navy sky, the ordered shades of flint, smoke, and blue slate hovering in their places.

The transitions from season to season are typically manic here, except for winter. It grabs hold of fall, strangling its leaves and burying them in feet of sooty snow and black ice. It announces its arrival loudly, and then marches on through the months, bleeding deep into spring, delaying the bulb sprouts and the return of sun and warmth. It’s the season that’s the most reliable. The most real.

But this year, it’s in hiding. It snowed twice, and melted twice. And now the mercury can’t even drop below freezing. It’s been damp and gray, and then bright and dry. The magnolias have started to bud and a bright red cardinal has taken up residence in the tree behind our house. Why fly all the way south? Chicago is the new Baton Rouge.

This false spring has got us all confused. What will happen to the plants that have been lulled from their dormancy by the increasingly moody climate? When — and I never imagined myself asking this question — will winter get here? While I may not think I particularly benefit from the cooling and slowing of this season, the plants definitely need it. They need the pause, the deep sleep before they can grow again, with renewed vigor below a strengthened sun.

So we’ll continue to wait for winter. We’ll continue to look for it behind every temperature drop and howl of wind. And we’ll continue to festoon our homes with evergreen boughs and reminisce the days long ago when snow stuck and daffodils didn’t bloom in November.

In Aldo Leopold’s 1949 book A Sand County Almanac, he discusses the necessity of moving toward a more holistic view of the environment. Crucial to this movement is a change in how we perceive the natural world. He argues for seeing wildlife as subject rather than object. He argues that plants and animals are, and should be considered, main characters in their own stories. That they have their own lives, and needs, and motivations that we may not share, but with which we can certainly identify. They are subjects who are worthy and capable of maintaining agency over their own lives — not objects who may rely on human intervention or whose survival is less important than ours.

When we start to think about other living beings as unique and vital agents in their own stories, we’re much more likely to empathize and relate. The switch away from thinking of plants and animals as an estranged “them” and toward thinking of a coherent “us” is a crucial first step in understanding that all the earth’s wildly diverse biomass is connected. That when rainforests in Brazil, or mangroves in Australia, or prairies in Illinois are threatened, so are we. That their safety is our safety. Their abundance, our abundance. Their progress, our progress.

Talking about conservation, the late environmental studies professor John R. Rodman explained, “When perception is sufficiently changed, respectful types of conduct seem “natural,” and one does not have to belabor them in the language of rights and duties. Here, finally, we reach the point of “paradigm change.” What brings it about is not exhortation, threat, or logic, but a rebirth of the sense of wonder.”

So, what about us? What about people? All the different kinds of people, and all the ways we look and act and are. It’s so easy for many of us to ignore those who aren’t like us, to only consider the ones we know personally, or the ones with whom we share common ground. But isn’t every person the subject of their own story? Aren’t we all an “us” too?

Perception goes a long way in forming our beliefs. The world is complicated, so our brains try to make sense of it by simplifying and categorizing. Much of this distillation happens quickly and subconsciously, but when it comes to understanding other people, seemingly simple categorizations can be flat out wrong, or at their worst, deadly. The more simply we see the world, the simpler we’ll expect it to be and the more dangerous real diversity will start to feel.

As we’ve pushed our world deeper into industrialization, we’ve over-simplified so much about it: its physical structure, its immaterial wealth, the roles we play here as stewards and co-inhabitants. Complex nature thrives only when it is allowed to exist as it is, an array of individual and beautifully interconnected systems. An environment where each biome is as unique as it is dependent on the existence of all the others. And as we are part of the environment, we must see ourselves as linked, to the Earth and to each other.

This holistic environmental view means there is a place and a purpose for all of us. It means we must think of neighbors, strangers, animals, and plants as an extension of our families, and of ourselves. It means biodiversity and human diversity are one and the same, and equally critical. It means overt and aversive racism, sexual violence, gender bias and homophobia, age discrimination, class prejudice, lack of accessible global education, undue cruelty to animals, disregard for the health of the environment, and active and passive destruction of the Earth are all unthinkable and unacceptable.

This is the paradigm change to move toward.

I grew up in Los Angeles. Some things about the place I purposely left behind, and other memories eventually turned vague, replaced by new daily routines, new landmarks, new sights and sounds and smells. But a few details from my years in L.A., I carried with me.

There was the sun and the heat, in all their various incarnations; the sweltering interior of a car parked out under a cloudless sky, the sizzling red blaze of the sunset piercing through the windshield. I knew well the long lean of the afternoon sun as it slipped through the living room blinds, staining white plastered walls with deep orange stripes. Those same stripes turning blue in the evening, reflecting on passing cars and gliding across the stems and leaves of my mother’s houseplants.

I remember the manic landscape. Giant, smooth trunked trees with bright green canopies pruned into odd and fantastic shapes. Jacaranda flowers bursting bright violet and floating like confetti onto the wide boulevards. Miles of sidewalk littered with fallen ficus berries and spiky Sweetgum seedpods. Finding tiny succulents squeezing through cracks in the cement, and ripping dead and dried morning glory vines from balcony rails.

I remember the fourplex apartments dwarfed by giant, towering cacti, and yellowing snake plants sliced in half to show the plastic surgery advertisements behind them. The smell of desert dust and sweetgrass that rose in the cool air after sunset. The gravel crunch and the earthworms that only crawled above ground during the winter rain, turning the sidewalk into a writhing, glimmering minefield.

I remember the distance. How far from nature I felt in some parts of the city, where the only trees in sight were spindly palms, a million feet tall and too thin to offer more than a cruel strip of shade on the gum-stained sidewalk. How exposed I felt there. How giant the sky, and how lost and tiny I was beneath it. I remember straining my eyes toward the palm leaves, strands of green glittering in the harsh sun, reflecting the glare like wet glass. After nightfall, the same palms drummed out a soft sweeping when the warm Santa Ana winds blew, fronds brushing against each other, their echoes interspersed with the roar of traffic.

I grew up in Los Angeles, and last week I went back. In the short time I was there, the city showed me that it’s still vast and incomprehensible. It’s still a strange, jumbled grid of green and gray, an intricate puzzle of well-landscaped parking lots. The city wheezes, choking out hot, smoggy breaths, struggling to hold onto whatever water it can find, and to pump out whatever oil it can still generate.

And yet, it is still beautiful. During our trip, L.A. felt foreign, and just like home. My memories came rushing back to me. The looming San Gabriel mountains burned orange and pink at sunset. The lull and crash of the Pacific’s waves played familiar rhythms. I retraced the curve of ancient oak branches in sandy canyons. And my eyes followed the immense chain of brake lights, so many lanes wide, disappearing in the distance.

Los Angeles is a driving city, so to get up close and personal with the diverse plant population, plan some walking tours or hikes. For this trip, we hiked from the Griffith Park Ferndell up to the Observatory and wandered around the canals in Venice. The Huntington Library and Gardens in nearby Pasadena is a plant lover’s paradise, but know that it’s closed on Tuesdays. For food, definitely go to Sqirl (if there’s a line, just go get in it — it moves quickly and your meal will be worth the wait), and add Cafe Gratitude to your list (the all vegan menu looks pretty crunchy, but is so flavorful and so satisfying). Also, say hi to my Mom if you pass by. Her house is the one with all the plants on the front porch.

Another sunny and surprisingly pleasant fall day meant more ambling through Lincoln Park. The last time I was in the area, I had come specifically to do some serious leaf-peeping. This time, the Conservatory beckoned.

Lincoln Park Conservatory is the little brother of the much larger Garfield Park Conservatory, just a few miles west. Usually a cold weather refuge, wandering around this plant-filled sauna is a therapeutic experience. The Conservatory’s footprint is compact; it’s a squat little jewel that glitters from across the lawns and empty fall flowerbeds of the Park. From the outside, the milky glass and heavy steel skeleton obscure any view of its dense collection. On the inside, the glass walls disappear and you’re suddenly somewhere else.

In the Palm House, you’ll think you’re in a place that’s wild and vast. Mature palms and tropical greenery fill the space, cutting through air that’s thick with humidity. The stone pathways wind through and around an archetypal jungle. It’s easy to lose yourself in the infinite leaf shapes, the crowning fronds and reaching branches, the vines, crooked and curving. Sound lands heavily in the moist mud, and sunlight expands and focuses through the settling dew.

The Fern Room evokes prehistory, when we were still fish and scaled giants claimed the earth as their own. Ancient cycads rise from heaps of Polystichum. Clubmoss and giant Staghorns hover overhead. Furry rhizomes creep outward and over mossy rock, silently drinking up the steamy air.

Something about this place is familiar, accessible. Save for the loose crowd of strangers and staff, it’s a little too easy to imagine myself living here. I romanticize constantly being surrounded by all this green, waking up to the sound of water trickling over broad leaves, the smell of damp earth in every room. Isn’t this everyone’s idea of the perfect apartment?

I listen as nearby tourists point out the familiar — the same peace lilies and Sansevieria from their indoor gardens — as well as the rare and strange. This place reminds us of somewhere we already know, and of somewhere new, somewhere we hope to see. And among the footsteps, hushed conversation, peals of laughter, and silence, the plants just keep growing.

Lincoln Park Conservatory is located at 2391 N Stockton Drive in Lincoln Park, just south of Fullerton Ave. It is open daily from 9am to 5pm and is free to the public.