Finding Peace in Nature: A Personal Journey
This year, I did something I’ve thought about for years. I took a pilgrimage to my “home” on my birthday. I took the day off from obligations. I made my favorite birthday cake, celebrated with loved ones, loaded the seven-month-old bully pup into the car and set off with a fresh cup of coffee to wander the area I grew up in.
For years I told myself I would not drive past the house I grew up in after my mother sold the property. Too much pain and sadness. I wanted to remember the property full of life- trees we’d planted, flowers, fruits. But on the way, I had a change of heart. Holding the memory of the house as it was, also holds me in the past. So, I drove down the old highway and turned off on the country road I know so well. Driving past the woodlot and the old cow pasture, I remembered so many idle daydreams on the bus. I drove past neighboring houses…and then there was the house I grew up in.
It hasn’t changed as much as I thought or heard it had. And in the few moments of going past, I could feel myself letting go a little. Someone else lives there now. It is full of their dreams, their life, their moments. As it should be.
Driving the three miles to my real destination took me past other country neighborhood houses. I knew all the old stories, but things had changed. The horses were gone from the pasture and a tangle of willows grew in their space. Gardens were in places they hadn’t been before. Family-owned businesses were gone. But in many ways it was the same.
Muscatatuck Wildlife Refuge is about 7,700 acres of wooded wetlands, small ponds and lakes, and memories. When I was younger, there were so many small spaces outside on the two acres we called home that were a sanctuary and learning space to me—the cool grasses under the picnic table sheltered by arching ash trees. The divot under the giant wild rose bush where rabbits nested. The cluster of locust trees. The gardens. The old pond.
But the wildlife refuge was a place we went to almost as regularly as church each week. Mushrooms, fish, berries, nuts, persimmons. We gathered them throughout the year. We wandered on and off trail. I made friends with so many trees and observed so many animals. Going back this year after many years of not visiting, felt like renewing old friendships. These were my peers and friends as a child.
This was the place river otters were reintroduced to the state. Here is a heron friend. This is the place I wandered in thought around the curve of the trail and an eagle lifted off a stone a few feet away—the closest I’ve ever been to a wild eagle. These are the cedars I remember in a stand. Here is the seedless persimmon old Myers cultivated. This was the stand of blackberries we stood in the sun gathering for my father’s birthday cobbler. Here is the old sycamore bent in odd directions and now almost falling down.
Changes were evident as well—so many young forests that used to be fields. Young cedars now older. This is the landscape that inspired my drive to live more closely with the land and all the beings sharing space and time with me. This is the land that taught me the value of wetlands and all their beautiful, ever-changing, and unusual inhabitants. This is the land that gave peace to a challenged young heart.
It was an honor to revisit and rekindle that relationship. Returning to the place gave me perspective on all the ways it inspired me to become the person I am today. Perhaps this idea of refuge inspired me subconsciously to name my business the way I did. Refuge – Shelter – Peace. That is a lot of what I do in any context: I hold space for people to find inspiration, collaboration, and move toward action together. That is what I hope for the land-based projects I design: create spaces of relationship and abundance between people and the land they tend.
That day, I loved seeing the heron standing patiently. In the cold, almost of the water was frozen over. The beaver lodge was looking particularly cozy tucked on the back side of the pond. And in the blue, blue sky sandhill cranes were calling out to each other and heralding the beginning of spring. What a beginning to my own new year.
