To Connect More Deeply With Nature
Bret Hesla © 2017
To connect more deeply with nature
Is a responsibility
We cannot preserve what we don’t come to love through touch and play
To sustain the earth, we must do more than purchase green products
We must touch the greenness and hurry up about it
Before it has all broken off the branches and fallen, brittle and useless
We must notice the spider chasing its prey in the cracks between bricks in our musty happy basements
To connect more deeply with nature
Is becoming a narrow privilege.
More and more it is only those with enough wealth and comfort
We who have the means and the time,
To carbon footprint our way across thousands of miles
To visit and be renewed in the majesty of earth’s dwindling beauty
Of course, the poor have the weeds growing around the front steps
While the well-off have whale tours in Alaskan fjords
Snorkeling with sea turtles in the Caribbean
And afternoons strolling through botanical gardens
After which we are on fire for preservation
To connect more deeply with nature
Is a pleasure
As the healing lotion of crane calls
and the aloe whispering of aspen leaves
soften the permanent scowl
of we, the screen starers
Until the relaxed face of wonder
Takes us beyond cheap smiling
Into the place outside of time,
Step follows step deeper into the head-high grasses of the bliss prairie
Till at some point our old eyes reassert themselves
And we look around, baffled but not concerned
And we wonder how in the world we ended up here
Next to these lovely, pulsing stands of leafy stemmy god-ness.