{"id":1962,"date":"2026-06-20T15:11:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T15:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/?p=1962"},"modified":"2026-07-04T15:16:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T15:16:16","slug":"lost-in-the-woods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/?p=1962","title":{"rendered":"Lost in the Woods"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<pre class=\"wp-block-verse\">Girl led means letting children decide<br>Will we go left or right or straight?<br>Will we take the bridge <br>or the hollow or the hill?<br>Do we stop for mushrooms <br>or dead birds?<br>Might we squeal at deer <br>or feign exhaustion?<br>Will the busy system be tested?<br>Will the campsite trail maps <br>lead us astray?<br>Will impromptu skits emerge <br>from the band of merry scouts <br>traipsing along sylvan paths?<br>Will each hiker cycle through <br>five stages of grief <br>and then tack on <br>seven stages of mania?<br>Will bright raincoat-clad teens <br>surge ahead<br>Surfing on the crest <br>of rulesets while forging faster, <br>manufacturing hyena-like bird calls <br>as they speed walk around the next bend?<br>Will they each take turns questioning authority, <br>creating their own power structures, <br>polities rising and falling <br>faster than Rome in a day?<br>Will girls share stories <br>of morbid true life headline stories <br>about hiking gone awry? <br>Will we finally find our way into dappled, <br>then full sunlight, <br>and emerge victorious near the camp store?<br>Will we survive this?<br>Will we go from huffing to hooray-ing, <br>high on the elixir of relief?<br><br>The answer <br>to everything, <br>of course, is:<br><br>Yes.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cLost in the Woods\u201d a humorous review of a day hike with children, witten Saturday, June 20, poem 171 in a series of 365 poems written by Diana Ludwick in 2026. Photo, &#8220;The Fearless Five&#8221; by Diana Ludwick (c) 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,311,200,887,1572,2,750,5,666,551],"tags":[1661,1660,79,38,1650,1658,1523,1656,1654,124,9,1288,1649,1657,10,1652,1651,1653,11,1655,1659,1662],"class_list":["post-1962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2026-poetry-challenge","category-generational","category-humor","category-loosely-hinged","category-of-place","category-poems","category-pun-y-tongue-in-cheek","category-rants","category-reminiscing","category-unserious","tag-authority","tag-camp","tag-children","tag-community","tag-day-hike","tag-dead-birds","tag-elixir","tag-exhaustion","tag-five-stages-of-grief","tag-hope","tag-humor","tag-june","tag-leading","tag-mushrooms","tag-parenting","tag-polities","tag-power-dynamics","tag-raincoats","tag-relationships","tag-seven-stages-of-mania","tag-victorious","tag-yes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1962"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2029,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1962\/revisions\/2029"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dianaludwick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}