Natural

it’s been a while since I’ve forgotten to post on a Monday and then backdated that week’s post. o o f I am stressed.

Recently I went to a poetry/discussion night for which the theme was “nature.” There was an open mic, during which several people (including me!) performed poems both connected and unconnected to the theme. There were three featured poets, all of whom brought thought-provoking and nuanced works. There was a discussion (no, really?! you say sarcastically). It prompted me to do some (both passive and active) thinking.

From the ages of 6 to 18, I lived in a small town in the middle of Arizona which is best known as a mildly New Age-y tourist destination. With an elevation of ~4350 feet above sea level and a population of just over 10 thousand, I think it would feel stifling to me now, and the reason it didn’t then was because I didn’t have a social life. My life was the outdoors.

Thinking about identity, we often miss things that don’t fit demographic categories because we deem them somehow less important. My mother hiked to Havasupai when she was pregnant with me. When I was 11 months old, my parents took me on a canoeing trip on the Green River in Utah. I was hiking in the Grand Canyon before I could walk; my family was helicoptered out of Phantom Ranch on the first day of the new millennium because three of us had stomach flu.

But it wasn’t just the trips we took that shaped me. My parents bought the empty lot of land next to the first house in Sedona. After we moved to the second house, my sister and I created a “secret passageway” running from one side of the driveway around the back of the house to the walkway from the driveway to the front door. Being homeschooled meant that we could be outside for at least half a day for a good 2/3 of the year, and summers were for swimming and road trips anyway.

Of course, this changed when I started getting serious about music, but it would have changed when I started high school anyway. Less hiking, no playing outside, and very little unscheduled time. I became more dependent on technology, foregoing the creative exercise of acting out a story for the passivity of reading one. Maybe I needed to do this, to focus my creative energy on the cello; I don’t know. We would still go for semi-daily walks around the neighbourhood, which I didn’t like very much — something about being told how to spend my time outdoors feels wrong to me.

We moved, halfway through my senior year of high school, to a city. I turned 18 around the same time. Phoenix is, as cities go, very flat and dominated by automobile traffic. We tried going for walks around our new neighbourhood, with varied success, and the following August I moved to Chicago.

It was a shock. I had to learn several new things all at once. I look back at my first quarter as a university student and I wonder how I survived. I was living on a campus, in an unfamiliar environment, sharing a room with a near stranger, learning how to use public transport, eating and my body, fresh from so many years of comparative wildness, absorbed all of the stress gallantly. Now, four years and change later, it is beginning to show strain — or is that simply the natural process of aging?

Living in cities, I have hated the fact that I have to go to a park to sit in nature; I have learned to hate the industrial grime that coats my shoes and outer garments and permeates my senses; I have tried to find ways of being wild alongside the rigidity of concrete and steel. I walk barefoot in the rain, I fill my living space with nature-inspired artwork (and now, slowly, with houseplants), I keep my window open as much as I can (pollution and weather nonwithstanding). My adulthood has been transitory and that has affected my ability to build community.

I have more to say but I’m out of words.