The importance of nature was a central theme of my childhood. I feel lucky to have been raised in a small mountain town. I am truly a product of my environment and appreciate where I come from immensely. Growing up, my family regarded nature in an almost religious way, or maybe more spiritual. For my dad, religion is not found in an organized group or building. His deepest connection to something outside himself is found within nature. This may seem like hippy-dippy spiritual mumbo jumbo, but I have found it to be true. Some of my earliest memories are driving up to ski every weekend with my dad. As we piled into the car, he would always say the same sentence before turning the key: “time to go to church”. For him, the mountain represents his religion and exploring it is a method of prayer. There are many ritualistic aspects of being outside and the preparation that goes into it. Overall being completely alone and surrounded by nature in an explicable feeling, and the closest definition I have found to religion. I have had several surreal moments in nature, where the environment you are in just seems to swallow you whole.
Clearly, nature has played a major role in my life, as I’m sure it does for everyone. I recently went on a trip to Banff, Canada where I got to do my all-time favorite activity: skiing. Trips like this one make the seasonal bum lifestyle even more enticing. I went with a group of around twenty CofC students, meaning there was limited alone time. One of the days I managed to ski around three runs alone after semi-purposefully losing the group in a tree run. Skiing alone has been a consistently meaningful thing to me. There is something about having complete control over how you get down the mountain, rather than stopping and planning out which run to take at every turn. Also, the solo chairlift rides are a few minutes of pure silence, allowing the focus to be solely on the surrounding views. The two or three minutes on the chair reminded me why my dad related this experience to a religious one and are almost meditative. Being in a mountain setting, surrounded by snow is when I feel most like myself. Nature has a way of making this sense of self possible.
Overall, nature has the ability to take you out of your own, seemingly large, but actually small reality. Spending time alone in nature gives you space to see past yourself and all your pointless worries. This I believe is why humans crave the natural benefits of being outside. It is an instant relief to sit in the sun, or under a tree, or in the grass. It is an attempt at connecting to our distant and ancestral ties to the natural world. We have, as a society, made an effort to distance ourselves from nature in the pursuit of comfortable lifestyles. Nature is now seen as something separate from us, rather than interconnected.