The story thus far

After months of rain and sometimes snow, the skies cleared and opened into sun. The constant noise of falling wetness changed into a thousand birds and insects singing. Even the plants seemed to sound out their speedy growth under the sun. All these motions and waves lifted into the spacious blue canopy, and yet there was still room for hazy spring dreams.

I had at last returned home to the country after many years spent under an urban thrall. There had come a point that I identified myself as sick, but had no symptoms anyone recognized as anything other than “normal”. Seeing the doctors and therapists changed nothing except my certainty that I was unwell. I began to doubt my own veracity, then my own existence. Soon I had developed a full-blown anxiety disorder, apparently out of nowhere according to the health professionals. It was then I decided that I could no longer trust anyone but myself to discover and cure the source of my sickness.

I left the city, then, but it didn’t leave me. Trying to shake an awful emptiness, I flew from coast to coast, from country to country. The void hung tenaciously on. Eventually, I allowed myself to take some help and move in to a small house in the country. This self-imposed retreat was in fact not a retreat at all, but a return to reality. I began to see that the city was in fact not the centre of the universe, but only its periphery, a black hole on the edge of reality that desired to pull everything into it. In the middle of nowhere, I found the center of everything.

For years I had been trying to find out what my purpose was in life, what I was here to do. In the sound and silence of the forest, the trees told me the answer. What was their purpose? Certainly they did not exist to just provide oxygen for animals. I slowly became aware that I had learned in the city to take everything for granted. I assumed the entire world was aimed at humanity, either for or against us. My anthrocentricism reinforced my egocentricism, and so my sickness. Lying on my back in the sun and the dirt, I happily let go. Now there was only nature living and dying all around and in me.