Redeem the Soul in Nature
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I’ve been revisiting my childhood and exploring past thought processes and imaginary experiences I had as a child. One of the ways I do this happens is one of my favorite past-times and that is through hiking and exploring nature. The natural world we live in offers so much that has shaped our experiences and beliefs. These experiences are tapped into, centering us, removing a sour mood and into the moment.
When I was a girl, I used to walk home from school every day in a very remote area. It was just me, the smell of the bay trees and ferns growing along the road, the sound of the water, running down the natural drain, the whispering of the leaves above as the leaves brushed against each other. I love to listen to the sounds of nature, birds, bugs, and the plop of a frog jumping into a stream as I passed by. But I was a child and I also became bored. So I began to make up another world inside of the one I could see with my eyes. It was an imaginary world of tiny people who lived in the small caves formed by the rain rushing down the hillside, who frequented the mossy land of green rich growth. They were tiny people who loved to sail down the wild rapids in their acorn boats. They were a daring people who lived adventurous people with free lives. They kept me company on my long walks, which became even longer as I lingered and stopped to pick grasses or make small houses for them out of twigs and leaves.
I also took many walks with my mother as a child when we moved out to that remote place. I came to love it with a passion I have not known since. My mother taught me many things about the environment, including the Latin names for every indigenous plant we came across and whether they were edible or not, or what their other uses could be. This knowledge and understanding bound me more closely to the natural world, and made me appreciate it in the deepest way. Its sustaining power fulfills me, and provides me with the strength and feeling of freedom that comes from recognizing I am only a small part but an integrated part of the whole. It’s this place in my soul that I uncover and rest in while outside, breathing the fresh air and listening, as today, to the sounds of spring articulated in the songs of birds, the buzzing and humming of the small creatures who make it possible for us to live in the beauty we do.
