The Most Home We Can Be
I go to nature - to the forests, the prairies, the rivers, the mountains, the ocean - to show me what only ecosystems can: how it all ties together.
The threads of life do, somehow, all intersect, weave, converge. . .
Joy creates spirals and whirling petals within our disappointment, illusionment, grief, anger, and pain is stitched over with surrender and peace.
Sometimes, when caught in the tornadoes of our chaos, we can’t see how it could be connected to anything else, anything larger, but when we choose to go out, and I mean home to the outside, to the forests, the mountains, the water,
to where we can hear the whispering of our souls, the soothing whisper of whatever it is that connects us to everything else,
we are Found. We find ourselves Home. We return to peace, truth, both sovereignty and community.
This is why I stand for life-centered living.
This is why, when chaos rules my mind and creates tornadoes in my gut, I go to the trees, the prairies, the rivers.
These are the places where I can see the whisper of the much larger tapestry we belong to, in which the various threads intersect and converge and align with Truth: we are all connected.
In these places, the internal chattering slows, the tornadoes settle, the internal alarms go quiet.
There is the sense that we are of this place, not the streets with numbers, not the piles of concreet and steel and glass, but here, with the robin, the milkweed, the swallowtail, the oak and the bluestem; the salmon, the fir, the sorrel, the eagle, and the alder; the oyster, the hemlock, the grackle, the blueberry, and the maple; the baobab, the violet, the hornbill, the antelope, and the red oat grass. . .
we evolved alongside them.
Our co-existence calls us home from within our own cells, the voice that becomes a symphony of physiological responses when we return to natural spaces.
We have known them for many lifetimes and are comforted by their company, and yet we are awed by how easy that comfort comes, and study it in laboratories.
And while we are now tracing the physiological responses that molecules like terpenes and phytoncides set alight within our bodies, it still feels like the scientific explanation is lacking.
I believe that’s because it’s only part of the equation.
We evolved in tandem, in relationship with, other chemical and energetic beings. If we explain the fireworks show of chemical responses that we experience as “love” for our partners, pets, parents, and favorite people, doesn’t it feel. . .reductive? Describing love as a series of chemical reactions doesn’t encompass or honor the laughter, the tears, the intimacy, the devotion, and the connection we experience in our closest relationships, and reducing Love to chemical reactions feels almost spiritually insulting.
I am prone to experiencing awe and excitement over our breakthroughs in neuroscience, biology, chemistry, and botany, and will continue to research them.
However, what inspires my continued study comes from a place much deeper: it’s the soar of delight when I stumble upon the threads that reinforce how interconnected our lives are, of which is near constant; it’s the fortification of evidence that shows we are more Home out there (outside) than we are in here (indoors);
that our bones and sinew and cells are made of, and belong to, this breathtakingly beautiful, spinning celestial - what, body? like ours? Entity? like each of us? - sphere, careening in endless spirals through the vast expanse of that thing we call Space.
Full of life. Full of questions. Full of answers. All reverberating around us and through us and with us. A chorus of science and mystery and knowing that we name, “Spirit”.
Nature is us. We are nature. What we do to ourselves, what we do to each other, we do to nature. Our outer lives are reflections of our inner universes.
When we go hiking, camping, forest bathing, walk through the park, sit by a lake, canoe down a river, wade in a creek, climb a cliff face, sail on the ocean, we aren’t escaping from real life: that is real life - where we are the most human we can be - and the truth of it is etched into our biology.
