New Tree School members expect nothing and find everything at Hitchcock Nature Center. Photo by Robert Smith.

Peter Matthiessen’s classic The Snow Leopard includes a lesson for all who walk in wild places: Expect nothing.

When we shed our expectations and preconceptions and enter nature as infinite and mysterious, a whole world, a new world opens before us in those landscapes we thought we knew. We may not travel the the farthest ends of the Himalaya like Matthiessen, but we can find nature as mysterious and wild close to home.

Find a wild place and leave your expectations behind.