Our human condition is to seek meaning, and the meaning that we seek is love. I’m not talking about platonic or romantic love. The love I speak of is expansive and indefinite. Our clarity is so easily clouded by discouraging news, petty dramas and numbing fears that we forget ourselves and our places in the world amidst discouragement. We resign ourselves to the ways things seem and the apparent hopelessness of our collective human situation when beauty and truth wait for us just beyond the curtain of our worries.
I write this from a sun-dappled patch of grass outside of my dorm. The sun warms my skin as the cool breeze ripples over me, and a few ornery patches of grass poke at my back where I lie. Gleaming magnolias and faded fir trees sway gently in the wind, and their quiet sighs comfort me like the hush of the ocean in Summer. The air smells clean and fallen leaves dance in wild twisters. Once I turned from hope and wallowed in existential despair, but no more. I have found meaning and love in the simplest and least expected of places: my continually growing connection with and appreciation for the earth.
My relationship with nature has changed a lot throughout my life. I was raised by an environmentalist who taught me that protecting the natural world should be among my highest priorities. My mother fought to protect the Florida manatee for years while working for the Jimmy-Buffet-founded nonprofit Save the Manatee Club, and she is unquestionably one of the best and most moral people I know. She has told me that her passion for protecting the earth came when she saw an advertisement by the nonprofit Keep America Beautiful as a child. She has always and unquestioningly been a devout defender of the earth.
I was not born so. I was inebriated with environmentally progressive ideas from an early age, but they meant little to me. I understood in the abstract that the natural world was being threatened by bad people, but could not connect myself with the issue. I was far away in fantastical worlds of my making, reading books, drawing, writing, running, climbing and playing make-believe. I lived in a loving, nurturing and supportive environment, and I had no reason to feel mournful or angry on behalf of the planet.
I did appreciate the earth, though, without realizing it. I ran and played in the forests near my neighborhood most days, climbing in trees and playing in creek beds with friends or alone. I didn’t appreciate what a rare gift those wild days were, and how few people have truly enjoyed the feeling of grass beneath their toes and the smell of blooming flowers on the wind. All this to say that I adored the natural world without knowing it; rather than loving the earth, I loved my backyard.
When my mom started bringing me with her to our state legislature, I was mostly uninterested. Starting at around age ten she began taking me to local protests and legislative meetings to teach me how to use the government process to enact change. She taught me what she had learned working as a lobbyist and activist so that I might do my part in defending the earth as climate change intensified.
The problem was that I didn’t feel the outrage that I was supposed to. It didn’t tear at the fabric of my soul that the planet was going to burn or communities far from me were somehow going to be harmed. I began feeling exasperated with the increasing hopelessness and anger that people around me were expressing at the decline of the earth. My attention was on my own insecurities, my competitive fencing career, movies and music, and I didn’t want to be distracted by planetary doom and existential questions of my morality and responsibility to our world.
My lack of commitment to advocacy was clear, and it became a subtle point of tension between my mom and I. Throughout my early teen-hood she continued surrounding me with state government and teaching me to fight for the environment, and increasingly I felt an imposter. Here I was, delivering emotional speeches condemning Duke Energy before my legislators and the North Carolina Utilities Commission and being praised for my motivation and initiative when deep down I felt as though most of what I was doing was fake. Though she didn’t see it this way, I began to feel like a mouthpiece for my mom’s outrage. Most of what I wrote in the speeches I delivered and the pamphlets I handed out were her ideas, not mine, and I lacked a core reason to fight for the earth. Though I don’t remember when, one afternoon a few years ago I told her that I didn’t want to advocate anymore, and she listened. She has barely encouraged me to take action since.
Long hours stuck in quarantine were what finally brought me into connection with the natural world in a meaningful way. As my mental health was tested by isolation and weariness, I found vibrancy and simple beauty in every walk I took or trip I made outside. I saw bright colors and fine details that I had never seen in nature, and I began to sense a grand, cosmic order to things that I had not realized before. Nature was no longer the subject of cold science for me; it became what was real, art embodied, love actualized.
On desperate walks, frantic runs and scrambling bike rides through my neighborhood and the town in which I lived, I found a sort of insane optimism in the midst of meaninglessness and despair. I found comfort in the knowledge that almost nothing was real but what I saw with my own two eyes under the open sky. I saw the duality of being alive; on the one hand, humans have so much capacity to hate, fear and stifle, but on the other, we have so much hope, drive and will to create a better tomorrow and see wonder in everything around us.
One afternoon, as a storm brewed overhead, I took my Dad’s beaten-up old bike out of the garage as I had been for weeks and rode the usual loop that I took through the neighborhoods near ours. A light mist was already falling, and it peppered my skin with cool droplets of rain as the faint smell of ozone danced at the edge of my notice. Cars passed at sixty-five on the highway nearby, coming into view between the trees that divided our neighborhood from the road and then going away again with a satisfying zipping noise. With barely a pause I hopped onto the bike and took off at my usual full pedal. In those days I biked as though the devil himself was at my tail, because, in a sense, he was. Moderation was off the table for me; my life was built on extremes. Fast biking, hours watching YouTube, hopeless sessions slumped against a wall feebly strumming my guitar and endlessly late nights were what I subsisted on. To stop and reflect was to suffer. My only objective was to fill my mind and my time with things other than my own thoughts.
I pedaled without abandon up and down familiar hills with the loud, optimistic acoustic songs of Mumford and Sons blasting at full volume in my left ear. I was a boy, almost grown, fighting a war within himself to survive. All that I had was the unknown, and I embraced it with passion and intensity.
The clouds grew thick and grey. The rain fell more heavily. I rejoiced in awe of nature’s wonder, heedless of my safety in the growing storm. I continued to bike, not caring that my phone was wet, barely caring that I might be struck by lightning or slip on sleek cement and break my head. All that I cared about was the experience of being alive and being held by the elements from which we all come.
The rain began to pour rather than fall. “Torrential” is an appropriate adjective. I now felt truly unsafe, so I stopped and hauled my bike beneath the boughs of a massive, ancient oak tree that cast its shadow many hundreds of feet across the ground. I felt a strange, familial connection with that tree. I felt that it saw me and was providing me a safe place to watch the miracle of the storm. With trombones and raspy songs of love and truth in my ears I took in the world of which I have always been a part but have rarely seen, and I saw in that beauty the answers to almost every question I’ve asked.
The pandemic was long and painful and it shook me to my core, but it also forced me to slow down enough to sit beneath trees, investigate mushrooms, watch crawling ants and otherwise appreciate the world around me in a way I hadn’t in years. I found peace and a reprieve from worry in biking and journaling beneath the hot May sun, and I discovered that when the stress of life in fear and confinement became too much I could escape that stress by stepping outdoors.
My experiences outside during quarantine began my journey toward a simple understanding of the power of love. Until then I had been caught in the superficial; since being forced to confront some of my darkest experiences in lockdown, I have been continually striving to understand what is truly important in my life. I now see that we all do have a duty to brighten the world, day-to-day, in small ways. I am continually working to develop unconditional love and a generous personality in order to contribute to the health of the earth and my fellow human beings, and the more that I do so the happier I become. One must do the right thing from a place of authenticity to feel the reward of having done it, and until I was forced outside of both my house and my comfort zone I had not understood myself with the honesty that I needed to be a truly good person. I am only beginning what will be a long adventure in learning to be the best man that I can be, and my connection with the earth will be a crucial part of that quest.
I witness the earth differently than I used to; the world seems friendly for the first time in years. My heart is open in a way it never has been. The land on which I wander has brought me truth and freedom.
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