Published in the Ottawa Independent Writers Anthology – 2025
From Nature
I look up at the night sky, the nearly full moon in clear view and I notice that my breath comes easy, most natural, as if my looking and my breathing is one continuous motion. Breathe in the moon, breathe out the moon.
I remember my habit of looking skyward as a child studying the cloud formations as I lay in the grass of my front yard, sweet green grounding me, or watching the trails of planes from the beaches of Killbear Provincial Park, warm sand hugging me. A psychologist once told me that people who notice the sky are healthy because they are connected to nature.
I was reminded of my skywatching days when Krissy Kludt, poet and teacher, posted images of skies on Instagram and I felt an early pull. For two months each year of my childhood, my family lived outside, camping everywhere that we travelled: each stop on a 6000 mile journey was a new lesson from the Earth. The Prairies, the Rockies, Bryce and Grand Canyon, the deserts of Nevada and Tiauana, Mexico. We had no electricity, no cell phones, no social media. For most of our trip, we lived in nature.
Summers spent camping for ten weeks in the Muskokas gave me time to catch frogs and create cities out of sand and water, forest and rock. I devoted hours to constructing vast amphibian empires that would fall overnight, my slimy captives breaking free. But time spent temporarily arresting them, living in the natural world, forged a deep connection. This was my toy box where I touched and smelled and learned the transience of life and the strength of nature to resist human interference.
For many years, I lost the sky and floated without knowledge of its power and potential in me. I once thought my desperate desire to camp and bike ride through forests with my first partner was a yearning for family tradition, but it wasn’t just that. I continued to feel the pull of sweeping whites, skyward blues and blacks, even after we split. My current partner understood this force without words or explanation and we built a life outside, camping, and walking in the forest as part of our communal nature. Those times on beaches, near water, in the woods, next to crackling fires, looking skyward restored me.
When studying literature, I often would tell my students to look for the contrasts, the juxtapositions that reveal some concept or idea about the human experience. I look up and realize my paradoxical position; staring into the night sky, the air above me where only visions of place exist in a mist, I am feeling grounded. I can study all the books, and identify all the themes, and intellectually indulge in all of life’s lessons, yet lose my way.
I think, “how did I allow my life to get so removed from nature?” And I wonder in the hurry of Western life how many others are asking this too.
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