What's your favorite place on earth and why? about ama HOT 1 CLOSED

For years, my answer would have been a small rock on the water side, on Skull Island in Lake Whitaker in upstate New York. I would canoe out there during break time from my summer camp, and sit and stare at the lake. Some mornings I camped on the island and could do this while fog still rose from the water in the nautical twilight, and I would listen to the ultimate silence of nature in a calm valley, where a twig snapping a mile away would echo across the mountains. Beneath a pine tree, I would think about life and be content just to exist.

But I went there recently, and I no longer feel like I fit into that space. My time at summer camp is over, and I've grown taller and deeper than that island in that lake can contain.

Now, for me, my favorite place on earth is a moving target. I reach it every now and then, when seeing friends. It happened recently over coffee on my uncle's porch with a stranger; it happened a few days ago while hiking in Tennessee on the Appalachian trail; it happens most Fridays when my cousin Jonathan and I drink at Aeronaut brewery after bouldering in our climbing gym. For me, my favorite place on earth is when I have friends, family, and nature around me, and I am involved in a conversation with them (or with the image of them I keep in my head, who I fabricate conversations with), and we enjoy the simple pleasures of existence, of stories, of good beverages - hot coffee, cold beer --, of youth. I'd like to say my favorite place on earth is next to her or his side in my bed, but I find that those times are so fleeting, that I often feel so excited by love that I want to do something (work, or hiking, or walking around town), and that they don't mean as much to me as a friendly word, as a good conversation. So, yeah. The place we come together and talk, that's my favorite place on earth. I feel at home there.

from ama.