The routine is irresistible.
Wake up, check your emails, trawl Facebook, bind yourself up with the endlessly coiling loop of twitter. During the day – probably a day spent indoors – a constant stream of information is fed to you from a phone that is essentially another computer.
By the time you get home the cycle is repeated; hours given up to staying up-to-date, staying relevant in a world in which relevance has become a second-by-second sea of a billion voices, all searching to be heard, all clamoring to be a part of something.
Find yourself a secret place, and get to know it as well as you know your own bedroom.
As you grew in the shelter of the womb, your eyes formed almost miraculously. They were able to perceive light through the safety of your Mother’s body, and you developed good nocturnal vision by the time you first appeared into the unshielded glare of daylight. For nine months, you had quietly befriended the cycle of the Sun and the Moon – light and dark, day and night – and so you (and me for that matter) formed a bond with the Natural cycle of Life that would never be broken, and that we share with almost every single species on Earth.
Making Nature a part of your life, your everyday life, is simple – but the rewards are unexpectedly vast, and life changing. If you have ever dreamed of being more confident, happier, healthier, or you’ve felt the desperate struggle for a sense of achievement in your life, the Natural world will foster you through a school that gives you – and there is no other way of putting it – a sense of who you are. It is just a matter of remembering a small part of where you came from – as that new life in the protection of the womb, where you first began to understand how the Earth works.
Unimaginable beauty is only ever a short walk from home – if you take the time to look.
It doesn’t matter if you live in a city, a town or out in the middle of the countryside. Life has found a way to exist in every corner of our Planet – even the places we have smeared in grey concrete and imposing skyscrapers.
It always begins with a realisation. Just like when someone says to you “Hey, can you hear that annoying buzzing sound?” and it’s only after they tell you that you actually do hear it, Nature finds its way into your brain once you get a few directions.
Us humans have complex senses and incredible powers of memory. Those senses, like muscles, can improve and strengthen with use. But, if they are never exercised – left to become feeble after years and years spent in the vacuum-quiet of the indoors – they become weak. To start, all it takes is a glance up into the sky when you set out the front door to go to work; to see a flock of Geese heading south for the winter, or to strain your ears to hear the birdsong in the early morning, and you will have accidentally entered a world that will never fail to surprise you or amaze you – for your whole life.
It’s in your hands, and we should never forget that those hands are there to enable us to interact, to manipulate and to understand the world we live in.
“The intestinal coils of this old Oak veer off sideways, reaching through the knobble-smooth Holly trunks, creeping through the emerald undergrowth.” – J. Lillis
WILDfal 