Nature's Sanity

It really is interesting how much emotion governs everyday life. For the past several years I have felt empty (I might as well use the old cliché, something was missing from my life). For only short periods of time would I feel full again, and those were times when nature and love combined in a glorious harmony. Only when I was with someone I truly cared about, and in nature was I at ease.

I bounce around my office job and city apartment with a lost type of acceptance. I run to the park almost every evening to center myself. Yet, coordinated landscaping doesn’t quite cut it, and nothing seems to cut through the loneliness. As with most of my emotions I have begun to analyze my feelings on days when I run to the park in comparison to days that I don’t. I also contrast them with days when I work at the YMCA camp that I have come to call home. And, in contrast to all of these comparisons I throw in the days when I have considered myself to be “in love”.

It is no mystery to most that know me that love has been missing from my life for a long time; it was far gone before my last relationship was even over. I have been searching for that certain connection for so long that I fear I will now miss it when I come across it. Yet the more I analyze the more I know the truth: nature and love are the only things that will make me content. When I look at a macro view of the earth, I realize that this simple fact is true for most people.

It comes down to this simple fact: humans are not content without nature nearby. Even in the city that Sex in the City says people move into to search for love, there is a park. People go to Central Park quite often, and even though they likely don’t analyze why, I think I know. Humans need nature, and without it we are lost, and thrown into violence.

It is more than just needing a plot of trees when it comes to me however, I need love too. Without both I am lost, and without either, I end up where I sit right now. An office, no windows, and no escape until my lease ends next August.

I wonder how long it will take man to realize that he can’t exist without the natural places, not just for technical survival, but for the soul’s sanity as well.

Just recently I met someone that within them seemed to have the same connection to nature as I do, a rare find in this world. I have only ever met one other person that seemed so in tune with all that nature had to offer, and they disappeared from my life quickly. There is something to be said for someone who really loves nature, and thus treats it like one would a lover, with care and honesty. I think that it is with someone like him, whether it be him or not, that I’ll be happy, finally. I think it takes someone who feels that tug when the sun shines through leaves casting a green hue, it takes someone who cringes a little when thinking about meat packing plants. It takes someone with a connection to the earth to connect to me.

I wish we could all find someone like that; the world would be a much better place.

Here is a poem I recenty wrote in regard to nature:


Intruders and Lovers
By: Me

A beautiful view
Rock and tree and air
Blue and white and green and clear
Forget the earth’s despair.

But what is this?

That shiny thing
Emerging from the brush
Hammered in sometime past
But hurting just as much.

The medal here
Does not belong
Its bolt bleeds out the soul
Why is man so violent
To the earth that is his home?

The scenes the places
Of natures’ loves
Desecrated and bare
Unnatural deserts scream
Of mans’ influence there.

The barren forest
The dammed old stream
No longer sway, or creep—
Or drip.
They blow with dust
And swell as lakes
And thus have stopped—
To live.

So fight the fight of the radical
The doomed, the hated, who’ll shove
Frown at greed and grin at green
For what is life, but love?