On the Art of Sitting with Nature
As a child in Ukraine, I grew up in a family that normalized extended camping and gifted me not only a love but a familiarity, a deep friendship with the natural world, a home there. Every day from the ebb of April snowmelts to the early chill of September we lived in a temporary tent village we fashioned on the banks of the Desna river, complete with a full propane oven, lace curtains, and dozens of sleeping tents outfitted with Persian rugs. In an era when citizens couldn’t travel outside the borders of the USSR (nor had the funds to do so), it was common to carve summer dachas out of the sandy shores of rivers to fish for blue gill, braid wild chamomile into our hair, and sing songs whose lyrics we scribbled onto the torn bark of white birch trees to the light of the fire surrounded by families camping nearby. To this day entire villages of friends and neighbors continue the tradition into their fourth and fifth generations of camping along the same beach.
After we moved to the United States, despite taking to the language quickly and dropping my accent, I never completely fit in with my peers. I tried to be interested in video games and pop culture but remained driven to spend time outside. I grew up navigating the lingering effects of being suddenly uprooted and transplanted in a new country, tasked with adjusting to a life with no familiar traditions or special places that felt like home.
In response, I began hiking and volunteering in natural spaces. I counted monarch butterflies in prairies in Illinois, assisted chain saw crews in removing invasive species in marshland, worked summers in an apple orchard, and volunteered as a weekend naturalist at Volo Bog, a rare and special place with pitcher plants and countless bird species. I read the works of John Muir and Walt Whitman, Bill Bryson and Edward Abbey. I ventured into forest preserves to practice the art of sitting in nature, quieting myself into stillness and becoming background, allowing happenings to pass through me as through a river. I learned at a fairly young age that all I need to do to help discharge stress is to find a patch of grass, take off my shoes and socks, and sit quietly with my feet against the ground to listen and reconnect with the earth.
As a young adult I set off on long solitary road trips where I camped in national forests and looked for that same communion I experienced as a child, eventually relocating to San Francisco for an internship with the Sierra Club and then running a department for an environmental NGO. While driving out west I took six weeks to weave through the desert southwest and fell in love with the immensity of the open sky and the parched hoodoo structures of the earth, a landscape dotted with chamisa and sage brush and goldweed that awaited summer monsoons. Years later I relocated to New Mexico, where the spaciousness and quiet spirituality of the desert spoke to me in a different way than forest.
Still there are those who look at the sparsely landscaped desert and say, “there’s nothing out here.” But life abounds everywhere, and isn’t that just incredible to imagine? What can we learn about ourselves when we consider that seeds are designed to stay dormant for years awaiting the perfect rain? To think that nearly every corner of this Earth is filled mostly with life, whether it be the whale-depths of the ocean, the tiny asters of mountain basins, or the tall spires of giant sequoias in Pacific old growth forests—the Earth pulses with life.
Yet I meet more people who call themselves indoorsy than I do nature enthusiasts. And I wonder if they simply weren’t introduced to the lushness of sleeping on cool grass while they were young enough to form that bond. If they weren’t taught to trust themselves and their bodies to negotiate feeling so small and vulnerable under the rotations of the Milky Way.
I think that our diminishing green spaces are the reason why cities harbor so much stress, and why nearly everywhere we look people have unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression. In the bustle of everyday demands, we forget to take off our shoes and socks and plant ourselves in grass long enough to unload some of the overstimulation we carry around in our bodies and minds; we don’t spend enough time simply being in nature.
Over time I’ve come to appreciate that this exchange with the planet is a form of nurturing that is always available so long as we keep some green spaces alive somewhere; that this is an extension of the maternal that we never grow out of needing and that, regardless of our own complicated lives and relationships, nature is there to embrace us.
These days I choose to live in the forest so that I can cultivate this relationship, and even though there aren’t many people around, being surrounded by trees helps remind me I’m always a part of something larger than myself. I’ve carved a little farm out of the Ozarks where I practice permaculture and delight in finding new passionfruit vines and echinacea that spontaneously pop out of the ground, often without my intervention. I recognize that I’ve delved deeper into the forest than many care to venture. But I wonder if there’s a happy medium where balance can be found again.
At what point does it become too late to develop a loving relationship with nature rather than an extractive one? Is there a point of no return when we become so set in our ways and too far removed from empathizing with an Earth suffering from plastic trash filling its oceans, from the tragedy of entire species of flora and fauna disappearing from this planet forever within our very lifetimes, from the simple joys of the close glimpses of entire other worlds within this one that our gardens can show us if we slow down and allow ourselves the time to look?
I wonder at what point the simple act of walking in the wilderness is a concept more foreign than colonizing Mars so that we don’t want to even try to salvage this planet as we watch the forests burn around us. We see it only with the utility of single use plastics and simply reach into space to grope around until we find a new one when there is so much left to understand about our own. Even now monarch butterfly populations are declining at staggering rates and we lack an understanding of why or what this means for the whole of our planet. The problem isn’t inherent in us; it’s in the way we’re taught to fear what lies outside of ourselves.
It's really no wonder that so many of us struggle with loneliness when we see ourselves as separate in the modern world. We are bearing witness to the fact that the greater our disconnection from nature the greater the imbalance within ourselves and in the rest of our planet. I think those who didn’t grow up nurturing this relationship may not know the simultaneous freedom and the sense of home that comes with sitting in nature and listening for the sounds passing through the silence and watching its comings and goings without attaching any value or narrative to them. Because with it comes the realization that nothing in nature is good or bad, that everything simply is, and that this is one of the most profound bits of wisdom to help us nurture a sense of compassion and understanding for each other, as well as a deep knowing that we belong here.
Interacting with nature is the first step to helping us see that we are connected to everything, that we are part of it all and are never, ever alone if we all learn to speak the language of the trees on this lush spinning rock dancing around our sun in a rapidly expanding universe. It may be the piece of the human puzzle that we’re missing now more than ever. I think it’s the single greatest gift we can give our children — this bond with an Earth that can sustain them long after we’re gone. We owe it to both future generations and the planet itself to make childhoods like mine not unique, but a common story of feeling at home on this Earth.
In a world where we are urged to move through time and space as quickly as possible, checking off tasks and moving onto the next, where our brains never stop chattering with themselves, if we develop nature-based and heart-centered rituals we can begin to remember what it’s like to slow down, to be here now, and to enjoy this moment—that indeed, it’s all there is.
SVETLANA LITVINCHUK is a poet and permaculture farmer with degrees from University of New Mexico. Read more.