All around are Nature’s calls to me,
Imploring to hear, feel, smell, taste, sense and see;
To quaff great gulps of her beauty.
To come and walk and sit and connect my soul,
and with joy surrounding me, make myself whole.
–Nature’s Call, David Kuhns
I feel Nature’s Call as she reaches out to me like an impassioned lover, begging me to enjoy her gentle touch and caress, the sweet fragrance of her scents, the beauty of her woods, lakes, streams, rivers fields, her flowers, her flora and fauna, the cacophony of sounds emanating deep from within her soul like a symphony wrapping me and taking me higher.
For as long as I can remember, I have had examples and mentors to help me recognize and answer Nature’s calls. One of my earliest memories is sitting on the banks of a stream in the high Uintah Mountains of northeastern Utah, watching my father fly fish the mountain peaks and quaking aspen groves. I recall struggling, as a four-year-old, to cross a tiny rivulet, and seeing a brightly colored brook trout swim upstream under my feet.
Later, my Grandmother Bertha and Aunt Mary provided the example. As I would stay with Grandma in her lakeside home in central Wisconsin, she taught me well. No matter what she was doing, no matter how busy she was, if she heard sounds of the harbinger birds of spring, the wild Canada geese flying, or if she got a call from my aunt, or from her niece Fern, “the geese are flying”, she would put down whatever she was doing, quickly throw on a coat, and head out for a walk in the crisp spring or autumn air, looking heavenward, listening for the sounds of geese by the thousands, gleefully pointing them out as they flew overhead in their familiar V formation.
Even in the last week of her life, having suffered a minor stroke a few days earlier, and mere hours before the massive stroke that would put her into a coma from which she never awoke, she walked, with my sister, down the path from my folks’s home to their dock on Lake Winneconne. There, she faced west, as she had thousands of times before, to watch one final sunset. With her brain barely functioning, and her mouth hardly able to form the words, she looked at the sky resplendent in its painted glory and said simply, but truthfully, “Beautiful.”
Led by examples like that, from men and women who showed me and came with me on hundreds of canoe trips, sailing trips, boating trips into the sunrise or the sunset, loudly singing and proclaiming “Oh What a Beautiful Morning”, people who trapsed with me over fields and marshes and through Woods of Wisconsin, is it any wonder I now — and still — heed Nature’s call?
Who would wonder why, even when alone, I’ve set out across glistening snow-covered fields in sub-zero weather, watching the full moon sparkle on white crystals? That I woke up at 2 in the morning in Utah’s canyonlands and couldn’t sleep as I watched Orion’s Belt set beneath the Colorado River canyon rim? Or that I paused on a long, painful backpack hike out of out of the depth of the Grand Canyon to watch the full moon set in the pre-dawn hours over the painted south rim on the Kaibab Trail? Or that now I lean with my back against a prehistoric old woman of the woods oak tree, or sit on the banks of the West Chickamauga above a gurgling and laughing rapids created by a Native American tribe who built their fishing weir out of the limestone rocks found on the land? Or that I wander seemingly aimlessly, but focus on the small colorful flashes of movement and the music of dozens of birds as my wife gleefully captures their images with her camera? As I teach her, in new ways, as others taught me, to answer Nature’s call?
Sometimes I feel like John Muir as I sway with swelling breast full of joy and fire, or like Walt Whitman as I turn my head towards the sky and pull out of the depths of my joy-filled soul that that barbaric Yawp to thank the sun and the trees God and nature for the beauty of the day and everything that I saw and heard and felt in it.
It was Muir who gave the example of heeding Nature’s call, showing and explaining to people how to love the land and nature. It was Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold who formed my earliest philosophical impressions and love of being in nature, who helped me recognize that what I was feeling as a young man with the joy in my soul was not unusual, and that I was not alone in it.
And really, examining all of history, many of the great philosophers, scientists, and religious people gave the example of going out into nature because, as others have said, our souls are connected with Nature’s calls. We are interwoven with the earth, and we seek to connect with it, even down to the taking off of our shoes on the beach or in the dirt. In our souls, we understand that we must remove the shoes from our feet, for the ground upon which we walk is Holy Ground.
Even God, as He created the earth, at the end of each day, stood back and said: “It is good.”
Save The Earth, Heal The Planet, Through Love, Not Shrieks
Compare Nature’s calls, those peaceful, joyful feelings and that love, with the shrieks and cries of politicians and activists telling us: “How dare you!” Warning us if we don’t change, the earth will be destroyed in 10, 20, or 30 years. And that it’s the governments’ and big businesses’ responsibility to make that change.
What Muir and Thoreau and Leopold and Whitman and others understood was that change and protection of the environment and the earth will not come because of somebody screaming and yelling and threatening. Change will not happens by insulting or belittling or shaming. Fundamental and permanent change will come from Love. That change will come when every person connects in his or her own way with Nature, not because of some government or organizational edict, but when they feel Nature’s call, personally, to them, when they sense deep within themselves what my father and grandmother and aunt and uncle and I and my siblings have all felt, that passionate love for Nature, for Earth.
Even Teddy Roosevelt, who created Yellowstone National Park, did so after connecting with it. Acommpanied by Muir, he set out on horseback through the land of a thousand smokes. He was so moved by it and by the description that others had written about it, he came back to the halls of power in Washington, DC and created Yellowstone National Park. But it wasn’t because someone threatened him, it wasn’t because someone said: “You have to do this or you’ll destroy Nature.” It was because he stood there in the midst of it and felt and heard and sensed Nature’s call.
There is an old saying that says you can attract many more bees and butterflies with honey than with vinegar. In the modern era, this is the message we have forgot. We shriek loudly and throw our hands in the air in anguish and sob huge crocodile tears about climate change and the rape and pillage of the environment. We beat our chests and bemoan the demise of our beloved Earth. And we point fingers at corporations and governments and big business. But when have you ever seen anyone who is trying to make these changes, admonish people to get out into the woods or into nature, to follow the admonition of Muir who said: “And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my Soul!”?
Instead these politicians and activists come by plane and car and train, walking on paved streets and sidewalks through huge guarded doors into giant steel and glass temples of government and power. They pound their fists on steel podiums in sterile rooms with comfortable chairs and processed air and no windows, telling all those who will listen, either in person or staring at some plastic and glass electronic screen, that we must save Nature.
And where is Nature in all of this? Nature’s call resounds not loudly from microphones on steel podiums, but in the still whisper of the morning breeze, or the lapping of the waves on a mossy shore at sunset, in the thousands of voices of our fellow creatures, in the flickering of the lightning bugs dancing across a misty patch of wildflowers.
This Nature’s call now becomes my soul call, the way I see to approach helping and saving the Earth. My answering Nature’s call is to love her. And how can you love something that you do not know? Can you love when someone yells at you from a stage of nations and says “How dare you!”? Can you love if somebody throws out what they proclaim to be scientific fact in some Green New Deal? If someone threatens you and all humankind with eminent destruction? Will YOU answer Nature’s call when people tell you it’s the government’s or big business’s or corporation’s problems?
Or will you love if someone simply opens a door in a humble cottage, in answer to the Nature’s call they hear, and says: Come, see. Come here and hear. Come, sense. Come, smell. Come, feel.
Come, love.