I parked my bike at a bench along the Missouri River. However, when we get to know the wild intimately, when we spend hours embraced in her goodness, when we transform our view of the world from exploitative to sacred, when we truly make that connection and forge a bond, it’s something that can’t be broken. No wonder there are so many lost and broken hearts wandering this land. That things do not have to change if we have the right things or the right look or the right position. We are led to believe that we are separate from nature, that our lives do not parallel nature. We are brainwashed to believe that letting go is weak and that holding on is paramount. Nature teaches us that there are natural cycles of deaths and births, sunsets and dawns, days and nights and that our hearts too must follow these cycles.Ĭonversely, Western civilization preaches that we should cling to beauty, to youth, to money, to power. Through her grace and example she reminds us that life is fluid, that security is an illusion, and that we must ultimately accept and embrace the changes that we face.
Our hearts aren’t “hardened” by nature, rather she invigorates and enlivens our hearts and through that process she makes us simultaneously (perhaps paradoxically) vulnerable and strong. I can’t remember how I mustered the strength to lift the bike into the truck or how I managed to ride 50 miles that day on an empty stomach, but I remember that ride as my salvation.Īnd I don’t mean fortify in the way you might think. On the third day of wallowing on the floor, I realized I was suffocating in my own sorrow and forced myself to load the bicycle into my old ford pickup and drive to the Katy trail, my favorite trail in the entire universe. Like a boundless chasm from which my most treasured organ had been ripped. The wound inside of me, when I found out that the person I loved had a second life felt irreparable. I couldn’t rise out of the blanket-nest I had created on the floor.
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