From the inside out

from being a visitor to a resident of nature

There was a time when nature used to fill my eyes. Emerald greens, mandarin garnets, and Indian yellows. Like diner coffee from a glass carafe into an 8 oz mug. Steam wafting away, waiting to be devoured until empty. Nature would enter my eyes, illuminating them the palette of earth, then vanish as quickly as the flutter of a dragonfly’s wings. 

The outside world filtered into me and filtered out, never steeping deep enough to recolor my spirit. I was impressed. Delighted even. But in the hands of the divine, I was not. 

I consumed nature with the intellect of an adult. I was inclined to rationalize the textures of a landscape. I wanted to be at the end of the means of beauty.

My relationship with nature was transactional. I was a tourist looking to take from the environment rather than be a resident. I walked into nature and out of nature. I returned to my adult life in the city and spoke of her beauty. The whirring streets and glass high rises pulled my back straight and my shoulders taut. The metropolis sang praises to the exuberance of maturity. An external showcase sometimes more valuable than the internal state. It was disapproved of, frowned upon to be other than an adult in the city. To be in a perpetual state of innocence. To embody wonder. In the city, my decisions were weighed. Once thought. Twice thought. Thrice thought. I wondered if my joy was perceived as absurdity. 

I carried with me, into nature, this rigid, concrete shell. Nature asked but one thing of me: to be a child. To chip away at my hardened layers. To allow the sun to permeate me further than a centimeter deep. 

Nature and I spent time together, in inconsistent ripples of frequency. When the sun rose above gray-blue balds and its light burst into incandescent flakes of gold with inconceivable softness across a gradient sky, the image was nothing other than commodity to me. Something I could write home about. 

But when I moved away from urban agglomerations into agglomerations of hemlocks and pines, sturdy sandstone cliffs, and tumbling rapids, it was immersion at first, and then detoxification that started to transform my relationship with nature. 

I thought that nature would work from the outside in. Pouring into my eyes and ears, gracing my touch, and then changing my internal state. But nature worked in the inverse. It was my inward senses that required tuning, to the frequency of childhood, before my outward senses could experience in full. I found that my perception of nature is a reflection of my spirit. A gloomy day is not gloomy because a weighted blanket of gray drapes low in a drizzling sky. A gloomy day is gloomy because the spirit is cloaked in gray as well. This realization laid bare the profound blur between the separation of nature and myself. My spirit, the wind. My body born of the earth. My heart, tuned to nature’s rhythm.

Nature was once something to be consumed. An occasional indulgence. Though nature has revealed itself to me as other than a commodity - no longer something I can live without for days or weeks. It is a lifeline, like the air I breathe, that tethers me to a more profound understanding of myself and the world around me. 

As a resident of nature, without particular excitement or special occurrence other than what is, I enjoy unyielding euphoria. In this new backdrop, dotted with cherry blossom buds and canvased with unobscured night skies, I am held in the presence of the sublime.

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My dear thanks to

Steven Foster

for pulling me out of a writing funk with some much-needed tough love. Thank you, friend.

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