I can tell today in Koke`e State Park it will be one of the latter. The kind of wonder that will penetrate my bones the way stubborn dust settles into the cracks and creases of my hardwood floors. And that will not make this a marvelous essay. I can hear my editor now: Nice writing, but there’s really nothing at stake. No urgency.

It’s the contrasts that please here. The spicy pine mingles with the sweetness of ginger blossoms. The cool breeze entwines with the warmth of the sun. Life sprouts from the death of giant trees, felled like dominoes in a duet of hurricanes decades ago. I kneel to photograph a fern growing from the softening compost of a tree trunk, hoping to capture the way the sunlight turns the spores red on the fern’s leaves. The movement of air tickles the hairs on my skin. An ancient ‘ōhi‘a, the most populous tree in the Hawaiian forest, leans one way, creaks, leans another, creaks again. I scan the treetops for a flash of red, for a bird once so populous in these parts, they could color the sky. Instead, the whisper of wind creates a symphony from what remains in the woods section. Another sound. Is that a woodpecker? Can’t be. There are no woodpeckers in this string of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

“I didn’t want to startle you,” a woman clicking two hiking sticks to and fro says as she walks toward me. “What brings you out here?”

I hold up my camera, unable to break my silence with words.

“I see,” she says, understanding where peering through a viewfinder can take a person. “Well, enjoy yourself,” she says, her poles pecking holes into the soft ground, as she moves on.

Look. There’s a bend in the gnarled trail of tree roots. Let’s see what’s beyond. More ‘ōhi‘a. Beyond the trees, I can tell the sky is graying. Time to head back before the rains come, as they do in a snap in a cloud forest. You lead the way. I’ll follow.

Right about now in this essay, something should be happening. Those stakes raised. The sky was foreshadowing something, wasn’t it? Maybe the loss of ‘i‘iwi and its recent designation as threatened. Maybe the warning is a fungus that’s killing ‘ōhi‘a, the backbone of the Hawaiian forest.

There. I spot a green ball, no bigger than a pea. It hangs from a spindly stem that I see is connected to a plant that, like so many others here, is growing from the ones that have gone before, building on the ancestors. The leathery-anise scented fruit is strung in lei and were once placed between the folds of kapa, bark cloth the way I drop a sachet of potpourri in my dresser drawers. But mokihana berries are harder and harder to find these days, like so many other native Hawaiian plants. Nearly one-third of all the plants and animals protected by the Endangered Species Act reside in Hawaii. There’s your sense of urgency.

I frame a few photos of the green berry, hoping they will turn out but not really caring if they do, the camera providing the means to focus on what’s in front of me, not some deadline, a thing on my to-do list.

The sky pushes us on. We follow our footsteps back along the leaf-matted trail with its distinctive sickle-shaped leaves of the prized hardwood koa as it bends a corner, turns upward for the final push to the trailhead, the road, my truck. Already, I can feel you falling back, the distance between us growing.

Here is where the epiphany would go. The insight gained from this experience. I could create meaning about how we live a life blind to the obvious and healthy benefits of time in nature. How the Japanese practice of “forest bathing” has been scientifically proven to lower blood pressure, blood glucose levels, and stress hormones. How the Oxford Junior Dictionary has removed 50 nature-related words from its 10,000-word children’s dictionary—including acorn, blackberry, and chestnut—and what the loss of those words portends about our children’s connection with nature. Acorn? Really? I might recollect my childhood summers with my grandparents, picking blackberries, eating blackberry pies, and slathering blackberry jam on my breakfast toast.

I could write all that, but this is just a reminder—no, wait, it’s really an urgent call—to me, to you to get outside and take a walk in the woods. Then, take some action, any action, all actions, to preserve it, the trees, the birds, the environment.

And there, mere steps from the trail, a flash of red. The sound, I place it now, the bird’s call sounds like a rusty gate. The ‘i‘iwi. I watch it, a single bird, high in the branches of ‘ōhi‘a, slurping from one pom-pom-shaped flower and another. A marvelous thing, a miracle, an object of astonishment. My hand goes to my camera, but stops. This is a memory for the mind, sweetened, because it was a gift from my friend, Wonder. This is what brings me out here.

See you again soon, I say. I hope.