Nature Detox
Goodbye Old Life
It’s been one week since we said goodbye. Goodbye to our apartment in Uptown Dallas, our kids, Gregg’s 12 hour a day job, my car, and the lives we lived. Lives so well-worn that we could have lived them with our eyes closed, like robots with our heads down, following the rest of the crowd.
Our first stop was a horse farm in Humboldt, TN, an unexpected paradise. It was a land sprinkled with tall trees and green grass surrounding the fenced pasture filled with yellow buttercups, bathed by the golden sun of springtime.
How My Nature Detox Began
We sat in the front porch swing the first morning, in our pajamas, wrapped in blankets as the cool air blew past us, rustling the tops of the trees. There is a road nearby, but hardly a car passes, so the silence is deafening, broken only by birdsongs from nearby trees.
I was acutely aware of the images before me that my eyes were feasting on. The sun-kissed horses, the deep green of the trees and grasses, the blueness of the sky contrasting the stark white clouds, and the utter absence of a building in my line of sight, looking at land that seemed to go forever. My senses were alive, awakening as if they had laid dormant for ages.
The winter this year was a hard one, even for the south, so I didn’t see much of the outside before our big move. Other than a few short outings, I’d been missing my weekly nature baths. My eyes felt ravenous, as if there was a deep need in my body demanding to be fed. They couldn’t get enough! I could feel my eyes drinking in the images before me. And at the same time, my body was detoxing, as if dirty energy streamed from my pores, ears, nose, and lungs. My body felt heavy and quiet, with waves of serenity taking the place of this dirty energy as it left my body in a torrential flood.
Changed by My Natural Cleanse
I had no idea until this moment how the absence of quiet and open green spaces had affected my mind, emotions, body, and Self. We are not designed to live in cities where our senses are bombarded with concrete, man-made structures, 90-degree angles, and depression- and anxiety-inducing fields of grey. Humans are made to be symbiotic with Mother Earth and all that she provides.
Just as I think this, I see the horses frolicking in the pasture, at times rolling like dogs on their backs with their feet flailing in the air as they rock to and fro, scratching their backs. Dust bathing. In nature, like these horses, we play and learn when we dig in the dirt or run through cornfields. We heal when we walk, connecting to the ground, pushing out energy to recycle it, and pulling in strong, pure energy to restore us. We are awakened by the trees, who share their vast gifts from ancestral roots that hold thousands of years of knowledge. That their roots mirror our own nervous system is no coincidence.
The images before me that my eyes were feasting on. The sun-kissed horses, the deep green of the trees and grasses, the blueness of the sky contrasting the stark white clouds, and the utter absence of a building in my line of sight, looking at land that seemed to go forever. My senses were alive, awakening as if they had laid dormant for ages.
Healing Via Nature Detox
It was this calling, between nature and my body, that helped me fight my way back to mobility after MS took over my body years ago. While I found walking to be fun, I found nature to be healing. I could not answer the calling deeply enough with short outings, hikes, or even nature-focused vacations.
Each time I drove back to the city, the gloom, like dark clouds on a stormy day, moved in. My body constantly yearned to be in green open spaces, but the choices I had made up to that moment in my life were not conducive to living away from a city.
I Choose Nature
It is only now, years later, that I fully understand the necessity for me to be in nature so I may heal and expand. I have made different choices that allow me to be in this wondrous sanctuary in the small town of Humboldt, TN, where I set swinging on a porch swing.
The birdsong quiets as I count the seconds, watching the sun disappear behind the trees upon the horizon into total darkness. The silence is so deafening that my body exhales, and I know I have finally answered the call to find peace.
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