A young boy finds a clearing while exploring the wilderness and meditatively observes the nature around him.

After one of her father's notebooks is recovered from an icecap, a woman recalls the love story between her mother, a rural woman who always wanted adventure, and her father, an adventurous explorer who disappeared on a voyage to the Arctic.

A man intently studies extinct mammals to escape his wife and mistress, who often vent to him about their daily worries and give him anxiety.

After hearing about his son's exciting experiences on a Boy Scouts outing in the woods, a father begins to feel jealous and detached from his work at a big law firm.

On a train a man tells a story about travelling in South America and the greedless society that he stumbled upon.

When an old woman sees her son straining to leave to see the world, she remembers her husband doing the same many years earlier. In a fierce battle pitting love against discovery and adventure, she does her utmost to set him free.

After a car accident, a man gains the ability to see into the past and attempts to contact a mysterious creature trapped in the cliffs near his farm.

A young man in a post-apocalyptic future embarks on a journey to take his parents' ashes to an impossible mountaintop ocean, despite tragic tales of the ill-fated travelers who made the journey before.

In a series of commentaries on the human condition — life, truth, happiness, death — a spinster sister takes in her dead sister’s children; a man is entranced by the endless waves which roll and crash in the ocean; a carpenter wrestles with the burden of being everyone’s confidante; a dying railroad crossing watchman shares a simple but complex wisdom.

When an anthropology professor moves with his family to a remote home on the Great Plains, a new friendship with an idealist, a landscaping disaster, and a disheartening consultation with an Indigenous man shake his beliefs about cultural relativism to the core.