How to Heal

Healing our land isn't just about sowing wildflower seeds. The secret may lie more in us healing our relationship with nature.

Summer now is ripening. The fields are going golden yellows. They are the first to play with the palette of fall, but I see a tinge of red and brown emerging on the maple trees, too. The bluestem grasses are opening, and their pollen floats in the wind. The goldenrod is beginning to flower, and the asters will emerge shortly after. The dance is a sign that summer's end is not just within sight but inevitable. 

Our days of sun and heat have shifted over the years to hazy sunsets from distant, or even this year, nearby wildfires and the emergence of invasive plants in our fresh water. Summer here is slowly changing into a very different season from the ones I knew in childhood. I wish I could say differently. I wish the smoke didn't sit in the hills many mornings and remind me of the pain we have placed on the planet. Living in a place surrounded by precious and wild places is not just a gift but an immense responsibility that I wake up thankful to have on my shoulders every day. Living here constantly reminds me of how we must teach our children not just to leave no trace but to improve the land because we walked amongst it. It reminds me continually of our responsibility to engage in our relationship with nature, not just to care for it, but for it to also take care of us. 

However, I have learned that healing the land doesn't just happen with plants seeded in the fall or taking a gravel hill and bringing it back to the wild nature it desires. These are worthy pursuits, though healing land runs deeper than just that. The real work of healing the land happens by healing ourselves and our relationship with nature. 

I visited one of the many wells around my hometown as a child

Being born in a sleepy town on the shores of Lake Michigan meant my childhood was filled with wild places. I remember going to the artesian wells that linger along the single-lane roads near Wequetonsing in Harbor Springs. I would enter them and feel as if I entered another world. A world where to this day, I know there are mysterious things that hid in the trees, watching me as I washed my face in the consistently cold water that gurgled into the pools from deep wells beneath the sand and rock. These wild places have been seared into my memory in my childhood. Though the shorelines of the fresh glacial waters of the lake were always a sign of being home, the fields, mossy hills, and cool woods always felt more like where I belonged. I learned at a young age to love nature because it was one of the only places besides my home where I always felt I belonged. 

As an adult, I have gone through ups and downs with my relationship with nature. I remember returning to those same wells in my 20s and feeling the magic enter me all over again, as if I had just come home to a warm holiday meal after being away for too long. I have learned that the land never stops being there for us; instead, we are the ones who stop returning to it.

The busy way our lives pull us from the wild places happens subtly in the modern world. We no longer regularly gather food from these places to survive but find it plucked from fields by farmers or in grocery stores under unnatural lighting. We may live in a city where the park isn't on our fastest route to the office. We walk from one building to another. Instead, as modern humans, we have to connect with nature intentionally. These shifting routines are where the disconnect has happened. As a result, we find ourselves as a society struggling with anxiety, stress, sleeplessness, and longing to fill something in our souls that we attempt with various vices. The thing is, though, that I can attest that by choosing to relearn that magical curiosity and connection we have with nature, so many of these things begin to subside in us, and not only do we gain this amazing relationship, but we build a new one within ourselves as well.

The hard part is that we must show up like any great relationship. We must show up in a way our ancestors didn’t need to. So the questions arise how are we willing to connect with nature again? How are we willing to intentionally begin to pay attention? How do we heal our relationship with the thing we share DNA with? The healing of land is a noble act, but reconnecting our body, mind, and soul to nature once again in a way to suits the modern lifestyles we have adapted to, is where healing of not just the scorching land will happen, but it will heal the emptiness that comes from a world of consumerism. 

I started a garden to reconnect to nature, and I know I am not alone in that. Growing things pulls us into the soil and creates a bond of reciprocity. We can see what happens when we intentionally begin a relationship with nature and how it gives back. I don't mean necessarily in a harvest of tomatoes, but in the way, it begins to give back in terms of conversations and lessons it gives us. These gifts are the things so many easily miss in growing a garden. We get caught up in our failures of what succeeded and what didn't. We find once again the modern value system of what our time is gaining us and what we can show for it. The truth is growing a garden and connecting with nature has no level of success or failure but only lessons and conversations to hear, but this many times is not accepted as worthy of our time in our busy lives. If something isn’t “succeeding,” can it still be worthy of our effort? The garden has taught me that, in fact, any care and attention we give of ourselves in nature is not just of great value, but it may be the thing that makes us better in every other aspect of our lives.

Over the years, I have intentionally reconnected with nature through the summer and fall garden; in the winter, I do this through long walks and skiing. These intentional practices have slowly taught me how to hear and pay attention to nature in new and life-giving ways. Walking amongst the plants and trees around me, I see them now as dearly as the people I love. I can feel the ache when things change in the woods and the sadness when the land rearranges around us as development happens more and more often. 

Connecting with yourself and nature is no different than any other good relationship you cultivate: you must show up. A hike or a brisk walk in the woods is only the beginning. We dig into the relationship with nature when we sit still long enough to identify the birds singing around us or breathe in the scent of the towering Eastern White Pine. It takes slowing down, which isn't always rewarded in our world of accomplishments. A healthy relationship between humans involves:

• Dedicated time

• Physical touch

• Words of love and appreciation

• Caring when we need it most

• Unexpectedly showing up when we know someone needs it most

Our relationship with nature is no different. A walk is just showing up, but how will you let that walk become an intimate conversation?

It takes stepping out of our human nature and submerging ourselves into the world around us. It's dipping under the water, floating on the lake, and being held. It is sitting in silence on the beach in winter while the waves roar and the snow blows, feeling the power and beauty. It is walking in the woods during the snowfall and being embraced by the silence while sitting on a stump. It is pruning the mint and sage and being engulfed in its aromatics. It is sitting for 20 minutes to breathe beneath the red cedar tree in the fall. It is feeling the rush of a thunderstorm rolling in. It is sitting in your garden and just watching and not doing. It is observing the ground level of the soil with your plants. It is trellising the tomatoes when needed, observing how they move as they grow, and working with their wild branching arms. It is learning the names of every flower that blooms around you. It is understanding the nature of the trees which shade you in the summer. It is holding an animal and caring for its needs as if it is as precious as you are. Every living and breathing thing that isn't a human is having a conversation, and I have learned it takes a lot of intention to hear it all. The conversation is happening with or without us. Our job is to be willing to jump in, and this takes work. 

Over these years, the more time I take to dig into my connection with nature, the more calm, humility, strength, resilience, and contentment I feel. Being a parent or even just a human is a challenging task. I have found that the plants feel the same, and if we bend to them, we will see that they have been bent already, waiting for us to be with them all this time. In fact, they never stopped being there. We just found our path no longer needing us to be as connected to them, but the truth is we both need each other.

In the fading of August, there is no better time to begin to hear the conversation or create this intention in our lives. Everything is before us. We can see the full fruition of the things planted in our gardens, but hopefully, we can see the full fruition in ourselves of what the months before now have created and built. There may be an unraveling of what you have known floating away on August's golden fields. If it is, let it. Allow August to be a time for bending closer to nature to hear her words. She is waiting to meet us. All we have to do is step into her forests and sacred spaces to sit and be with her. I know I will continue doing just that this month and as we head into fall.