What Mother Nature Has to Offer Your Addled Brain

I hadn’t yet encountered nature when I flew from NYC to visit my friend who had moved to Menlo Park in California. On the day after I arrived, she and some friends took me for hike in Humboldt Park, a nearby nature preserve. It sounded great, then there we were in this vast landscape with fields that went on forever and hills I couldn’t imagine ascending.

Of course, we were high. We were in our 20s. We were high a lot. That made things worse. My mind spun. What if I were to get a mile out and didn’t have the strength to get back? I’d never walked in nature. Why it was different from walking 30 blocks in the city? I didn’t know, but it was.

Note: Like Eloise, I am a city child. Queens, to be exact. Set down in any city and I made my way with nothing more than a folded paper map. No problem. I had a sense of cities. But nature? I still joke that we didn’t have nature in Queens.

When I started to shake with fear, the whole group, annoyed as hell, turned around, got back in the car, and took me home.

Rediscovering Nature

I didn’t have another foray into nature for years. But then I rented a little house in Northwest Connecticut for some quiet to write my first book and on those long lonely days when I needed some distraction I started to explore the nearby trails. There was nothing else to do. I was older by then, too, in my 30s, and determined to face my fears.

Little by little, with my dog Stanley at my heels, I inched up those trails. I had no idea where the trails would take me. I didn’t know what trees, bushes, or flowers I was looking at. I didn’t even have a water bottle. But I had my trusty paper trail map and just kept going. Remarkably, it was o-kay. Just.

Here’s the thing, though. As frightened as I’d been in such unfamiliar terrain previously, I was starting to feel comfortable; Stanley was, too, though you would have thought that little powder puff of a white Lhasa Apso wouldn’t have wanted to get his paws dusty. Once, when I got us lost, Stanley even led us back.

After a few months of this, I felt almost embraced by the landscape. I can’t tell you why, but a cartoon image of Mother Nature, emphasis on mother, kept coming to me. As if the landscape itself was nurturing and the trees were standing guard. The surrounding hills felt protective; when I mounted them and looked out at the vista, I felt like a child hoisted up in a parent’s arms to see the world at their level, if only for a moment or two.

The stillness was captivating. I couldn’t get over the way the mountains had been there centuries. And there I was among them. Very impressed. By the time I sat back down at my desk a couple of hours later, the answers to whatever I’d been trying to figure out would magically appear.

Surprise. After the rental was over and the book written, I kept wanting more. If I’d liked nature in the small, what would it be like in the large? By then I had built the muscles to find out. I was used to long walks. I had mastered the pace that kept me going. I was no longer afraid of not getting back.

Fortunately, I had a boyfriend (my future husband) who was willing to take hiking vacations. We’d just pick some random mountainous place, like Northern New Hampshire or Stanley, Idaho, find a B&B or a motel, and take day hikes there for a week. How we loved them. We’d press on even when we had to wait for a moose with giant antlers to move off the trail or figure out our way around a fallen boulder. Danger? What did we know?

Nature as a Necessity

By my 40s, I noticed that I hungered for nature if, for whatever reason, a sprained ankle or being city-bound for work, I couldn’t get away to hike. I realized I needed nature in my life—it was nature by then—the way I needed my dear friends, my morning coffee, sex, or love. A decade later, nature felt essential. And not, it seemed, just to me.

Environment Essential Reads

The Importance of Getting Kids Outdoors

Three Key Insights on How Being in Nature Changes the Brain

Spending time in nature to ground yourself was becoming common advice and “nature heals,” common wisdom. In Japan, “forest bathing” became a thing in the 1980s and by the early 2000s, the idea of “nature deficit disorder” was said to have launched a movement. I have found healing—and infinite pleasure—in nature, which I think will happen if you can find a place in nature that’s comfortable enough to let it sweep you into its arms. Whether that’s the Swiss Alps or a beach a few subway stops away, a canyon or a city park, it’s worth going, regularly. That place can soothe when anything upsetting happens or when there’s such excitement in your life, you can’t calm down. If you can cultivate a relationship with nature, it can be a refuge. It just might do with you what it’s done with me, a city child—bring me to the wonder at the center of itself and my own self as well.