If you know nature, can you vote against it?

It’s been nearly a month since the last newsletter.

I ask your forgiveness in missing the first of the two monthly newsletters: it felt like the world was ending. I felt flattened, dulled, numb, heavy and hollowed out. I wasn’t surprised, but somehow that made it even worse: it was like I had manifested it, somehow. Like all of us who saw the writing on the wall had somehow given up, deep down, and in so doing the worst case scenario unfolded. The reality is much more complex yet much less confusing, really. The election results are the election results.

Sometimes facts can really pack a punch.

Like always, I found myself needing to look around at the natural world in order to get back outside of my sad, upset self. At first it was difficult. The birds that are still here, sticking out the winter, sang their cold-climate songs, but I couldn’t hear them. The leaves, still free of our first killing frost, were transcendent in their colors of fire, but I couldn’t see them. Not really. The rain came down and that just felt fitting. The sky felt low enough to graze the top of my head and that weight and damp felt right, too.  In short, it was hard to let nature in, to do its healing magic. It was hard because I felt like a friend who knew something terrible was coming, yet I couldn’t say. Seeing the sky, the birds, the trees, the grasses, the flowers, I felt both responsible and distraught, because I knew what was coming for our planet in a few months was going to be so painful and destructive. This knowledge choked me. It made me feel ashamed to find the beauty in nature, because I felt very strongly that us humans had been doing a terrible job at appreciating and safeguarding nature, and now, with the vote, we’d slammed the cell door and walked away with the key. What right did we have to “enjoy” nature, when we were actively taking actions to destroy it?

And then I shook myself out of it. Because my goodness….dark thoughts can really get you going down the wrong track, can’t they? I didn’t feel worthy to enjoy the beauty of nature because of how nature was about to be even more destroyed? That would be like going dead-serious and refusing to joke around with a friend with cancer. What a rotten friend I would be if I did that. So why was I doing it to nature? Isn’t she enduring enough?  The point was the joy. The reason for safeguarding the planet was the joy, the immersion, the noticing and feeling wonder and appreciating and exploring and admiring and being in it. That could never be wrong. That could never work against the interests of nature.

If nature was meant to be ugly, it would be ugly. It’s not ugly.

Nature, left to its own devices, balances. It generates. It improvises. It builds. It creates. It communicates. It grows. It is a teacher and a healer. It listens. It speaks. It provides. It paints pictures and dances in the wind and combines in extraordinary, unexpected ways. It surprises. It delights. It adapts….as much as it can.

I felt so awful those first few weeks after the election, when I couldn’t take joy in nature.

It was like a friend had moved away, or a very important door was closed and locked from the other side. There was a massive, gaping hole. Every person annoyed me.  My patience was as thin as the socks I’d taken to wearing because I didn’t have it in me to root around in our hamper for the softer, cushier ones. I looked out the window and my eyes fell on the alley, sidewalk, houses, roofs, fences, cars. I saw only and exclusively those things made by humans.  It was awful.

I really am starting to suspect that the way I was feeling those first two weeks of November is not all that different to how many, many people feel most of the time: immersing only in those things created by humans. Being technically in nature, but not being a part of it. Not feeling it. Not seeing it.

How can you feel the urgency, the responsibility to do everything in your power to cherish nature if you spend most of your days without feeling its joy?

I think the election results spoke the answer quite clearly: You can’t.

I hope every person who voted against the planet in this recent election goes for a hike. Picks up leaves and presses them between the pages of a heavy book, for later. Plants something. Takes photos of mushrooms and mosses. Weeds. Holds their hands to the bark of a tree. Raises their face to the rain. Breathes the air in, deeply. Watches a bee land on a flower….and keeps watching until it flies away again.

Policy and reform are needed. Different manufacturing and consumption practices are needed. But really letting nature in, I would argue, must come first. If you feel its joy and its healing, its fun and excitement, its capacity to teach  as well as its peace and awe and wonder, I think you’ll fight like mad to protect it. Won’t you?

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the vast majority of people are very connected with nature, very cognizant of what it does for us and to us; are cued in to its rhythms and spend a lot of time closely observing, listening, seeing, learning. They see how we’re part of nature, and its part of us, and they absolutely get that it’s all connected.

Maybe I’m not wrong. Maybe I’m just wrong to put my own political beliefs here, in my business newsletter. There are no end of experts who say to never, as a business owner, give an opinion. To never let it be known whether you are red, or blue. For there’s the risk of alienating potential customers.

I’m more concerned with the risk of alienating ourselves completely from nature. And in so doing, being able to treat nature as if it doesn’t matter. I’m more concerned with trying in my own small way to get across the fantastic love and joy of nature: flower, leaf, tree, roots, soil, sunlight, air, water, bud, bloom. In getting across both their beauty, and also their meaning. To help connect the dots between ourselves, and the natural world of which we are a part. If that’s risky, then so be it. I’m here for it.