The Forest Refuge

In our primitive past it was a place of
haven, a refuge for us in our bare 
necessity of survival and we took advantage
of all that the untamed wild offered us as
we learned which of its products could
sustain our lives while its other equally
needful inhabitants exercised their own
survival options we often on their menu.
How far we have come we special species
proud nature endowing us with our
introspective brains and manipulative
capacity enabling alterations of our
environment producing from it another
landscape entirely one subject to our
made-to-measure orders divorcing us as
creatures of a higher order from the world
of nature long left behind and in our
estranged condition utterly unknown and
unfamiliar to us, a place to be shunned
for who knows what threats lurk there?
Those whose instinct it is to turn to what
we have so long spurned to be nurtured
anew through a re-acquaintance leaving us
with the deeply ingrained and unalloyed
pleasure of rediscovery know of a certainty
that the place that bred and sustained us 
boasts a quality superior to any inventive
minds emulating and amending nature's
blueprint risk despair without return.