Nature was my God

When I was sixteen, I wore Birkenstocks and I wrote across them in thick sharpy marker, Nature is my God.

And it was. God was trees, wind, light, wild flowers, and calm. The sweet calm that my feet retreated to many a day.

Skipping school on the regular. I called myself in pretending to be my mother or I just left. I couldn't stand to trudge through the halls of my high school. Wearing my statement shoes, but walking as if I were wearing the heaviest wooden clogs, like the weight of the titanic. I was sinking in my life.

School was superfluous. It is not natural the way we teach - corporations, factory farms masquerading as educational institutions. 

But it did give me something. It gave me an 11^th grade English class that came with Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman. These men got me.

I read their works like romance novels. My heart embarking on their journeys, feeling the depth of their words a feeling like going home.

Somewhere inside of me, I too knew that there is more to all of this. I wanted to go home.

I felt it when I was cradled in tufts of tall grass, sunlight flickering through the stems and dancing on my eyelashes. I heard it in the crickets, bees buzzing, and river flowing. 

 

In the contrast of my suicidal, trauma filled life, this was my salvation.

Make no doubt about it, my soul made love to those trees, that blue sky, the tall grass waving in the breeze.

Take me, I said, this is me - in a sort of meditation, with what I knew then, I knew that I was without a doubt a part of something more.

Something pure and I merged with it in those moments, Nature was my God.