I’ve decided to participate in On Being’s Summer of Pause - a thematic series, where, each week, we get to explore a new theme and think more deeply about the art of living. My Grace Notes for the next few weeks will talk about these themes. Stay with me.
I’m a week behind on my Summer of Pause (or perhaps I’m exactly where I need to be). Last week’s theme was about our connection to nature and a wild love for it.
One time, a friend told me that outside didn’t love me. The sun burns me. The allergies bother me. I wish I could forest bathe but it would be a miserable experience.
When we moved to this suburb almost a year ago, I was excited about my family being surrounded by nature. There are trails and waterfalls. There are birds and squirrels…and bears. How exciting to get away from the sirens, the motorcycles screaming down the street in the middle of the night. I loved being in a part of the city where I could walk to everything, but I was relieved at the lack of cacophony that this move afforded me.
And then, I couldn’t sleep. The silence of nature for the first few nights was deafening. The summer night was a weighted blanket that fell on the neighbourhood, muffling everything. The morning was nothing but birdsong and children walking to school. Can you be stifled from relief? I’m not sure, but perhaps that’s how I felt.
I spent the first few days staring out of the window, heat emanating from the sun and filtering into the house - I had wanted big windows. The garden outside had dried out from neglect - dead bushes are still festooning the sides of the fence. Should I water them even though they won’t come back to life? I felt like I had asked nature to come with me on this next journey and it had, sort of…declined. No thank you. I’ll be here and you can come to me if you like. But I couldn’t love it the same way that others did.
So now I don’t fight nature anymore. Finding a place in nature meant doing it on my own terms. When nature says, come spend time with me. I’ll say, my way of spending time with you is to water this orchid and leave the windows open in the home. It is to smell the incoming rain and sit for a few minutes underneath an autumn tree.
Rumi said that there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground. In my case, it’s not literal.
I’ve come to the conclusion that nature and I love each other from a bit of a distance. Perhaps it’s a mutual admiration but I don’t always have to dig my nails into the earth. But that says a lot about our relationship with many things. Does outside love me? Probably. I get to live in nature. I have sustained greenery of all kinds in my home for decades (except for basil, which dies like it’s part of a Shakespearean tragedy). We can care and be present without engaging or digging ourselves in. Sometimes the wild green silence says much more than the rancorous footsteps on the muddy ground.