On Resisting Nature
On Saturday, I went to Joshua Tree for the day with my friend and it was absolutely incredible. The park takes up about 790,000 acres with more than 80 percent managed as wilderness. It’s where the Mojave and Colorado deserts converge and you can really feel the wildness of the land.
I had been to Joshua Tree as a kid when my family drove through it as part of a three week RV trip to the national parks of the southwest, but I must have been maybe 12 or 13 and so the memory of it was faint.
This time, my friend Alex and I (side note: Alex also has a podcast called Limbo that is very wonderful)...we drove through one gate to another - stopping along the way to get out of the car and weave around prickly plants, to climb boulders, to observe jack rabbits, chipmunks, my friend even saw a desert fox. The sun began to set and we found ourselves watching the landscape change, shifting and turning into magnificent shades of reds, yellows, oranges, and pinks as the sun cast its rays across the open landscape.
At one point the light on the rocky landscape was so beautiful that I pulled off the road a bit too quickly and almost lost control of the car. My friend and I both jumped out and darted across the street to gaze at the horizon. As the sun moved beneath our visibility, it cast these bright, bold rays as if some higher power had intentionally gifted us an otherworldly show of light. It was so magnificent, I felt like crying and also running. I felt this moment in my body where I wanted to tense up and shut out the intensity of the experience for fear it might consume me if I were to open to it. I took a deep breath, let myself relax into my body, into the moment, and made a wish.
On our drive home, my friend and I talked about the idea of resisting nature not because it’s scary, but because by really allowing ourselves to connect to it, it awakens parts of us that are unfamiliar, and challenges our sense of identity, of reality and what we thought was important to us.
When you open to nature, you open to certain parts of yourself that are not about your accomplishments or what society has told you about yourself, or even what you’ve told you about yourself. When you open to nature, it starts to make the things in your life that you’ve decided are important, a bit more trivial. To feel a deeper sense of satisfaction that isn’t culturally valued in the human world is very disorienting. It’s not a highlight reel, but a fullness. It’s a realness, or perhaps rightness.
This is a feeling I’ve felt many times as I’ve slowly welcomed the natural world back into my life and I wonder how many of you have felt this same feeling. If you have, hello - I’m here beside you and I think this is a very exciting place to be.