Nature of Healing
Photo Credit: Tim Swaan
There is a bug flying around my living room. I try to swat it toward the window. This isn’t my home. Flies only live for a few days, but they know this area better than I ever could. So I try to take the gentler approach and swat it toward safety and survival. Sometimes we try new versions of ourselves in new places. We adopt new traits when we leave our homes for a bit. This is happening right now for me. Work has taken me outside of the metropolitan arena I know so well and plopped me in a small town in the country for six weeks.
Whether you agree with the sentiment or not, we have all heard about the power of nature to heal ourselves. People may go for just a quick vacation or a longer retreat. There are numerous ways in which engaging with nature has been shown to help people clear their minds. Some use it as time to be alone and slow down, others to connect with the natural surroundings of Mother Earth. Often, we see nature as an escape, a way to get away from the things that are plaguing our daily lives (our “reality”). But if nature is just a way to get away from the “real world” is that always a good thing? Is using nature as an escape a good thing?
Escapism is no mystery to me. From the moment they are aware of being “other,” queer people know escape. We use it to survive and protect ourselves from the world. Nature, then, has always been welcome. Beyond its ability to transport worries about daily life into the back of the mind, it brings us to a place where there are no rules on how to exist. Every ecosystem is connected and yet no creature is fixed on how it moves through the world, because all beings are needed. Is this then an escape from reality that connects me to surrounding nature? Perhaps it is a return, meeting reality one to one in true connection; no opinion.
This lack of judgment has bled into other experiences of mine with nature. My family was big on going on walks when I was growing up. When you live in Northern California, one has beautiful trails available all around. This walking allowed for greater conversation. There was no distraction from being present with your surroundings and the people in those surroundings. Casual conversations suddenly turn into inquiries about the future, possibility and optimism. It brings my family to that return I experience in solitude. No wonder some of the best conversations I’ve had have happened walking around my neighborhood with my folks.
These walks became a necessity at the start of the pandemic. A daily ritual with my parents challenged me to dig for more with every stride amongst the feelings of loss. I found myself once again getting much quicker to the root of humanity through walking and talking, finding that return once more day after day. Sometimes I wouldn’t stop there. I would often go for two walks, once alone and once with my parents. I could spend hours thinking or talking to myself while my feet carried me further up a hill. My journey with my gender was still in its beginning stages of true exploration. Why was I able to ask these things with such clarity in the open air? Was I using nature as an escape to do so? How do I search for these connections when the four walls come back up?
It is access and community that allows me to live as authentically as I can in my daily life. I, along with queer folks in the same position, or better, am scraping the surface of what I deserve and need. For those in a different position, escape may be the only way to safely search for those answers. What I hope to continue to bring to the “real world” is my ability to search without nature needing to be the reason why I do so in the first place. Some see nature as a cure all to be consumed once in a while for clarity and rejuvenation, some as a necessity for survival. How do we take the lessons that nature can offer and live them over and over? How do we bring escape to our world so we can return every day? We need to break the cycle of taking nature and using it as an antidote to the ecosystem of our lives. We must continue to see the interconnectedness of our lives, even in the parts that feel less glamorous.
I don’t want to escape reality, I want to step into it with nature’s guiding hand. We must continue to learn from nature’s offerings, make offerings of our own, and return again and again by living those lessons. We must slow down with those around us, and it won’t happen only through proximity to nature. Interconnectedness with people happens through active engagement, and the more we engage, the less a return to nature will seem like something fantastical; it will start to feel like the liberation we all are working toward. Q
