The Role of Nature in My Life

“Things We See Today” The role of nature in my life has greatly changed in the last five years, as well as in the change from adolescence to adulthood. I don’t believe that nature has changed but my perception of nature has and always is, from the rising sun over the cityscape of San Francisco as I take the L Train uphill on Taraval Street, to watching the quarter-sized, glistening diamond, snowflakes fall outside my window as I try and stay awake to catch a glimpse of Santa before morning. To me, Nature is not the woods or a long, sweating hike, nor is it Golden Gate Park in San Francisco or any other city park for that matter. To me, Nature is catching that rhythm the world beats, that I beat, that you beat, that every pulsing animate and inanimate object beats and feeling that smile spread across my face with no effort or prompt and, knowing at this moment, I was it, all of it and it me. I don’t label it with oneness nor do I feel like I’ve lost my individuality, I have just tuned myself in so well that every strum is pitch perfected, octave above and octave below humming and I feel the waves breaking over and through me. As a child I was surrounded by the stereo-typical definition of nature; the woods! I grew up on twenty acres of a densely forested plot of land, where the winters were as cold and numbing as rejection but as beautiful and awing as love accepted. I grew up outside the small town of Grand Haven (though my definition of “small town” would change when I moved to Bolinas, CA) about twenty minutes from Lake Michigan. As a child my mom was always kicking me out of the house (for her own sanity) telling me to go play in the woods. I explored the surrounding woods with no fear but lots of mosquito repellant and had many Carroll like adventures. Once, I even used a felt, roll-up map of Canada I had gotten from Niagara Falls as a treasure map that my twin childhood friends, Ryan and Randy Hackenberg and I were going to find that treasure