Nature as Healer, Teacher, and Refuge
Nature, even the lone tree, is so much greater than we are and helps us put life in perspective. It can bring us joy and cause us to refocus and rebalance when we are weighed down with emotions, stress, and problems. Nature inspires healing and creativity. After all, it is God's creation and continuously creates itself anew.
Even as a child, nature inspired peace in me. I loved to watch the trees moving their arms when I sat by the window of the bedroom I shared with my sisters. The trees seemed alive, beckoning me.
As an adolescent, I retreated to the woods when life seemed too much to bear. I walked among the trees headed to what I called my spot, a concave space in the ground made by a fallen tree, its roots sticking straight up, as if pointing to heaven. I leaned back in my spot and watched the pines waving their branches over me, softly moaning in the breeze, as if speaking gently to me.
The trees seemed to understand when no one else could. It was through their comfort and peace that I knew God was with me and loved me. They made me feel that everything would be alright. I just had to trust and listen.
I didn’t realize then that my communion with the trees would eventually lead me to a lifelong study of the British Romantic poets who lived and wrote in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Nor did I realize when I first settled on this area of literature for my doctoral studies that these poets and I shared an affinity with nature and the spirit within it. William Wordsworth knew long before I did that nature could lead us to realize God’s magnificence, His Almighty power, and the wonders of His creation. Nature is not synonymous with God, but if we can appreciate and love nature, we can better appreciate and love our fellow man.
All aspects of nature—mighty forests, vast oceans, starry skies, towering mountains, and miles of varied landscape--can inspire. Nature can be pastoral and gentle, such as a tiny bounding lamb or lovely flower-filled meadow, but it can also be sublime, powerful, overwhelming, even dangerous, like predatory animals, erupting volcanoes, and destructive hurricanes or tornadoes.
I have stood on the ocean’s edge on calm, sunny days and thought about how beautiful the sea is, although my eye can take in only a minute part of it as it blends with the horizon. I have walked the beach in high winds, not quite hurricane force, but with soaring waves whipping foam and wind roaring and blowing stinging sand in my face. Both aspects of the ocean are fascinating, beautiful, awe-inspiring, and humbling.
Whether woods or wetlands, fields or gardens, oceans or canyons, mountains or deserts, all of nature is worthy of love, consideration, protection, and sometimes caution and care.
As we lose natural habitats, farmland, wetlands, and woods to development, warehouses, drilling, urbanization, or any endeavor that encroaches on the natural world and its inhabitants, we need to look to the future, knowing that every action has consequences, often unintended ones. What is once lost rarely can be recovered.
I continue to retreat to nature, which still delights and comforts me. Samuel Taylor Coleridge taught me long ago in his poem “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” that I can find peace and inspiration in the smallest part of the natural world. Sometimes, I find tranquility and joy just by observing my backyard, with squirrels scampering, mourning doves cooing, and a pink dogwood’s flowers displayed for a brief time before the petals drop and it becomes a bare tree awaiting its future glory.
