It was the summer of 2007 and some friends from the city of Cranston came to Goddard Park to hang out. We were laying on the grassy knoll looking up at the gorgeous blue sky and feathery clouds move by. It was strange summer for all of us because many of our youth group was just starting to intermingle, the EG (East Greenwich) and the Cranston bunch starting going out to eat more, going to movies together, going to one another's houses, etc. I mean the state of Rhode Island is small, but even a 15-20 minute drive on I-95 was a big deal. K, one of my friends who is currently in the Czech Republic, was talking about nature and how everything seemed "so green" to him. It surprised me because I had grown up in a relatively suburban town. I always interacting with nature, whether in my backyard or when I ran in Goddard Park for cross country. I would spend hours in the park just running the trails, that by that time I knew most of them. I enjoyed looking up at the sentinel trees above me, the sloping paths running up and down, and the beach where the Atlantic Ocean lapped gentle on the sand.
It never occurred to me that I would miss the wilderness so much, or nature so much until I moved to the big city of Toronto. Not only do I miss nature, but I miss living animals that I'm so fond of. For some reason I always had an attachment to cats and dogs. Cats, even the grumpy and withdrawn ones would come to trust me. Dogs always seemed to love me, and whenever I would go to my friends' houses I would always be scratching the back of their ears, or the stomachs. I think it came down to my own calm and relaxing demeanor, animals can instantly sense a person's personality just by your presence. And they know when you're afraid of you. If you're too pushy, and you want to pet any animal they can instantly become defense, running away from you. But if you give them time, they naturally come towards you and eventually gaining your trust.
I miss having a tank full of fish swimming around in little to no gravity. I always wondering how strange it would be to be a fish who looks out at the world of "oxygen" while living in a world where you know you could stay alive and move anywhere you could please. Fish always had some calm effect on me, especially when I fed them and you could see their little mouths breaking the water to nibble on the flakes on the surface. Maintaining the tank was hard work, and most of the time my father took care of them, but it was worth just having a tank to be near a nonhuman organism.
I hope that we don't forget about living and growing things around us because we have to understand that they are a lot like us too. What I mean by this is, that even animals need to be shown love and need to be taken care of. I've had turtles, rabbits, hamsters, gerbils, birds, salamanders, and frogs. We had to clean their tanks, take them out for walks sometimes (the rabbits for instance and the birds flew wildly around the house pooping everywhere), and show them respect and dignity even if they are animals not as intelligent as us.
I hope we can still feel captivated by the vivid red strips on a poison dart frog, or the downy soft fur in the back of a rabbit's neck, or the intricacies of spider's web. I think these all reveal to us God's magnificent hand upon all these living things. I hope that we can find ways not to distance ourselves from the living earth, from the dirt and ground that gives life to all the fruits and vegetables that we eat.
We're all interconnected with the earth no matter how much we try to separate ourselves from nature, with all our big houses, our climate contained bubbles we live in. Or even the sad fact that we have to look at the weather forecast on the internet instead of stepping outside or opening a window for a fresh breeze of the outdoors to disrupt our orderly filtered lives.
I can't tell you how me times I dream about living in the wilderness, off the land like what our ancestors use to do thousands of years ago. Perhaps it's a tad bit idealistic, and unpractical, but it's a lifestyle of sleeping underneath the stars, and feeling the change of weather, and the rawness of nature without any modern day conveniences that draws me. Or it's the part where I realize that I'm just a small part of this world, the insignificance that every human feels when they stand before the Grand Canyon that I want to feel, to understand, to contemplate until I loose myself to nature. Sadly I don't know if we see the world with wonder anymore, and we would rather experience life in digital media.
I hope I can go on a road trip, or camping trip one day for a month or two with some friends to experience God's creation. Every time I have gone camping or been in nature for several hours I feel rejuvenated by the simplicity of nature itself and the cycles of life and death before me. So I encourage you to go out to your local park to see the "movie" that God is playing for us 24/7 free of charge. We're just not paying attention when the blatant beauty is staring us right in our face telling us that there's a world around, beyond the news of man, that is nature itself. It's just asking us to discover it, to enjoy in it, to respect it.
Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden were naked, not only in the physical sense but in a spiritual sense as well. They were totally saturated in God's presence, because they could see God in all of nature. They had a direct communication with God, partly because Adam and Eve "ruled over" or "took care" of the animals. Nature renders us all naked to the realities of our true natures. The fact that we are largely dependent on God for our daily needs as much as the animals, plants, and insects are dependent on God for food and shelter.
That's why I enjoy gardening so much right now. Because I'm coming to realize that is where we will find our humanity and a lot of what we were really created to do, which is to live and enjoy this earth that God has created. There's nothing like the feeling of freezing cold water of a stream or the feeling of dirt on your hands. It brings us back to the fundamental nature of survival that we so badly need in this sanitized world of chlorine and cubicles. This is a world we're made to enjoy.
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