I am blushing as I write this. I am so very in love.
With fields.
I probably feel happiest right now when I am in my car heading south on Hwy 195. I can feel a peace come over me and then happiness blends in when I pass Spangle. Almost two hours of drive time, just me, the car and the fields.
I used to have music and CD's on most of the time. If not that, a podcast for sure. I'd occasionally keep the car quiet but not often.
I realize now alot of that was about being distracted. I was eager to keep my brain engaged so I didn't have to feel how deeply sad I was. If I listened to someone else sing or listen to someone else talk, I didn't have to think about how I wasn't doing either of those myself. (How much of our lives are we living distracted?)
The past two months, a substantial shift is occurring and still ongoing. I feel oddly calm. I am occasionally happy. I feel at peace with quiet. In fact, I am craving quiet.
Nature fits nicely into this rhythm, and I'm presently intoxicated by the beauty of the Palouse. I do crazy things to capture it and observe it. I drive down random sideroads. I pull over on the shoulder. I climb into fields.
I try to just observe and take it in before I start snapping pics. "That curve over there, the shadow is black on the backside. The fog hugging that small valley. The hawk circling over the grove of trees." Then, click, click, click.
I remember the first time last summer I felt like nature was a character in my story. I was driving up out of Pullman, literally rising out of the city through hills and valleys. I realized, "I'm coming up from a womb. I'm climbing down into this very female, nurturing place and then arising again, more healthy and nurtured than before."
I have not been the same since and to feel this much passion for something so strong and stable, that love is changing me. My love for and of nature and it back to me, it is as tangible and alive to me as a deepest companion. The stability and immensity of nature has allowed me to receive and feel love during a time when my heart had closed off to all other feelings.
The Palouse slowly crept in, slowly revealed her beauty through all the seasons and every time of day, and without realizing it, love began to flow in me once again.
Maybe that is one of the great gifts nature is supposed to be to us... a gift we can always depend on. Spring will always come. Autumn will also follow summer and winter will bring yet another change.
If we fall into that energy and that beauty, we can have a relationship that sustains us when human ones are depleted, painful, lacking, absent. Maybe we can even be recharged enough to not give up quite yet on the ones that we want to continue but feel we are unable.
Maybe we ask too much of our human companions. Maybe this endless, bursting energy around us is waiting to heal but we demand our humans provide it all. We demand we provide it all as well.
We can be healed.