Solace of Nature

When grief knots me up, I head for nature. Breathing the fresh air of the mountains, forests, and meadows clears my mind and opens my heart.

Nature demands nothing of me. It accepts me as I am.

I can sit beside a river for hours and let the sounds of the undulating water soothe my sorrow. I can wander in the forest’s cool shadows when the brightness of the sun becomes too much. As I hike over the mountains, I physically work out my anger and frustrations.

In the evening I sit in a meadow, or on the side of a mountain, and listen to the birds chatting to each other as their day winds down. I watch the yellow and orange colors of the sunset settle over the land, and shift to alpenglow’s red and purple. Then, in the deepening darkness, I feel the companionship of night’s solitude.

I lost touch with nature’s beauty for a time. When I first returned to Yosemite six weeks after Evelyn’s death, I ran into our happy memories of being there together. They burned like bonfires, reminding me who was missing. That trip was a disaster and I ended up leaving early because it was too hard to be there alone.

On the morning I left, I carefully made my way through the darkness down to the river before dawn to say goodbye. As the rising sun poked through a gap in the mountains and sent a narrow beam of light into the dark forest, lighting up a grove of green aspen across the river in front of me. I could see that the image was stunning, although I couldn’t feel it inside. This told me that one day I would be okay, but for now I had to wait in grief’s darkness for the light to reach me. 

Thankfully, when I returned to Yosemite later in the year, I could feel awe for nature again, and this helped balance my ongoing grief. I was afraid that I had lost my last sanctuary. I marveled again at the power of 3000-foot-tall El Capitan, delighted in the cascading waterfalls, and was thrilled when coyotes and deer wandered by. That trip I hiked every day from sunrise to sunset. After the first hour on the trail, the chatter of my surface thoughts calmed, and I had hours to meander my way through grief. 

As I watched nature carefully, I saw how it dealt with death — nature mourned for a moment, and then moved on. I also noticed that nature was constantly changing, even in mountains made of granite. Rockslides continued to come down and bury trails and animal habitats. Mirror Lake was filling in with sediment brought down by the river and becoming a meadow. Each spring the river flooded and adjusted its course. 

Our lives are always changing, too. People we love continue to die or move away. We start new jobs and explore new interests. Because of death, I’ve learned that the tasks I do are never as important as the compassion I share with others.