Remembering the Way Forward
Earlier today, on the fourteenth anniversary of my wedding, I was flipping through an old copy of The Final Artdown looking for inspiration.
I was searching for a story to support an article about Nature and attention. Instead, I found a poem. I had written it the day after my wedding fourteen years ago, and forgotten it was there.
As I read the words, I found myself meeting a younger version of myself across time. Not through memory alone. Through something she had left behind.
One line in particular caught my attention:
"The path laid out before my feet
Unfolding with each step."
Fourteen years later, I am still walking that path. The circumstances have changed. The landscape has changed. I have changed.
And yet, something essential felt immediately familiar.
It was a reminder that perhaps we do not always need to push to become someone new, someone better. Sometimes we simply need to remember who we have been all along.
Perhaps this is one of the gifts Nature offers us.
Not answers. Not instructions.
Just enough quiet that we can meet ourselves again.
For a long time, I have described my work with a simple phrase:
"I reintroduce people to Nature so Nature can reintroduce them to themselves."
People often pause when they hear it.
What does it mean for Nature to reintroduce us to ourselves?
The answer is both simple and difficult to explain. Many of us spend our days surrounded by information. Through social media, news articles, reports, we are told what to think about, what to worry about, what to improve, and what to pay attention to next. We become very skilled at analyzing, at thinking about things.
Less often, we create time or space for noticing.
Nature offers something different.
A forest does not ask us to become like someone else.
A meadow does not require us to act a certain way.
A bird does not care about our accomplishments.
Nature simply invites us into direct experience.
When we slow down enough to pay attention, something interesting begins to happen. We notice the wind moving through grass. The rhythm of our breathing. A distant bird call. The feeling of our feet touching the earth.
We begin to experience the world directly rather than through the constant filter of our mind. This is not about escaping life. It is about returning to it.
Over the years, I have watched people discover unexpected insights while observing a cloud, listening to water, following animal tracks, or sitting quietly beneath a tree. The insight did not arrive because someone told them what it meant. It emerged because the conditions were right. Nature has a remarkable way of revealing what has been waiting beneath the surface of our attention.
This is why so much of my work is not focused on providing answers. Instead, I focus on creating conditions. Conditions for noticing. Conditions for curiosity. Conditions for being present. Conditions where something meaningful might emerge, softly as a dragonfly from a forest pond.
Like the path described in that long-forgotten poem, not everything important or meaningful unfolds according to our schedules. A seed grows in its own season. A flower opens in its own time. We can nurture the conditions, but when we push too hard against the natural rhythm of becoming, there is often a cost.
Many of the most meaningful moments in life arrive in much the same way. Not through pressure. Not through analysis. But through attention.
Perhaps this is what it means to allow Nature to reintroduce us to ourselves. Not because Nature changes who we are. But because, for a little while, it helps us remember.
And sometimes, that is enough.
Fourteen years later, I am grateful I stopped rushing long enough to notice.
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