In late afternoon, dark clouds slowly rolled in. They hovered, seemingly unmoving, blocking more and more sun as they thickened the sky.
An evening thunderstorm was forecast. After dinner I lay on the couch, reading, when I heard the first grumblings of thunder. Lightning flashed. I turned off the corner table lamp, closed my computer, put away my phone and opened my deck’s screen door.
Soon after, heavy rain bounced off the roof and tin carport, water gushing down the gutters. Lightning increased, filling the sky, visible through the slats of the living room shutters. The smell of rain and thick humid air entered the room. When I walked to and stood behind the safety of the screen door, I could feel wayward, uninvited drops of rain at my feet.
Nature was all around me.
The last few years have recalibrated my relationship to being inside and outside, to being distant from yet an inescapable part of the natural world.
In trying to shield myself from a virus — itself most likely derived from a chance encounter with wildlife and humanity — I’ve spent more time inside than ever. At the same time, when I have ventured out, I’ve chosen to frequent places with outdoor seating. I’ve taken more walks around my neighborhood.
This has left me exposed, more than I would have previously chosen, to the weather. If it’s raining, I may choose to eat at home rather than go out. And if it’s too hot, which it frequently is in Texas, I’ll either wait until the sun goes down, again opt to stay at home, or brave the sun and heat.
I used to avoid that heat. But needing to get out has forced me to adapt. I’ve come to be more accepting of it, even liking it at times. In the late afternoons after exercising, already hot and sweating, I like to take a long walk around the block. The extra sweat on my back, arms and forehead doesn’t bother me. It’s refreshing to let the sun cool me down after a workout. Who needs a sauna when you live in Texas?
But nature being what it is, it’s not always pleasant or soothing. Gone are the agave plants that lined my driveway, frozen to death from the 2021 Texas freeze. The palm tree outside the front door needed to be cut down. Gone too are countless other shrubs and bushes, leaving the area in front and on the sides of the house barren and sparse.
What remains in their place are the memories of that storm: the wind howling, rattling the window frames for hours, pelting the same windows with ice and snow. The intermittent loss of power. The rationing of food until it was safe to drive again.
When I look out my office window to the street below, and see dirt and rocks where there was once green plants, I am reminded how much we exist at the mercy of the natural world.
The Wild Around Us
On a walk through my neighborhood this summer, I saw a silver-backed armadillo crossing the street. Its legs were tiny and he moved at what I thought was a fairly slow place, considering the risk it was taking that it was oblivious to.
In the upper corner of my deck, not far from an electrical outlet, yellow jackets nest, flurrying about during the day, resting at night. Each time I knocked down the nest, it would be rebuilt within days.
Occasionally one will get inside my apartment, and I will instinctively dispose of it, out of fear. ‘Stay outside,’ I admonish the wasps, ‘where you belong.’
But like the armadillo, the wasp doesn’t know the difference between inside and out, between a field and a street. Wildlife may have their preferences, but to them, nature is the world, wherever they are, the presence of humans a mere nuisance, or not acknowledged at all until we become a mortal threat.
How naïve of us to think we exist separate from nature. To us, nature is a destination, an activity, a mechanism through which we can participate to soothe our souls and senses, or a source to be cultivated and plundered for sustenance and pleasure.
At long last, it seems we, the collective we, a larger ‘we’ (perhaps and hopefully) are noticing the changes in our natural world. The variance in temperatures and seasons, the havoc of wildfires and storms, the threats to the crops that feed us, the fragility of the foundations of our buildings and homes and the systems we’ve created to organize and structure ourselves — it all seems so new and present.
For the majority of human history, we’ve had to accommodate ourselves to the natural world. The seasons, the wildlife and poisons that could harm us, the conditions that threaten us.
But we are in a different era now, where we expect nature to accommodate us — and we’ve taken that for granted to the point of destruction.
Imagine living centuries ago, when the air and water were pristine, but we were vulnerable to nature. Alas, the joke is on us. Our air and water are no longer pristine, and we are responsible, yet we are still just as if not more vulnerable.
The wasps are inside the house.
No Escape
As much as we’ve been warned, we of course don’t know what awaits us from what we’ve done to the natural world. We don’t know the future of nature’s influence and impact on us: how much it will be a source of joy and connection — and how much a threat.
To return to nature is a philosophical misnomer: we’ve never left, we can’t escape it, no more than a whale or dolphin can leave the water.
We can build and seek shelter from the elements. But as we hear ice flung against our windows, hail bounce off our roofs, and watch houses crumble into the ocean, these shelters are no less part of nature as we are.
Floods leave discoloration on homes and buildings, a testament to how high the water can rise. We are not as intimidated as we should be that the high water mark has never truly been set, and that it is most assuredly above our heads.
So we learn over and over that while we can never control nature, we can impact it. And that when we do, on the time scale of nature, it is usually at our own expense.
There is so much wonder in nature. The Grand Canyon. Niagara Falls. The sequoias of northern California. But we must internalize — and soon — that nature is not apart from us. That we are a part of it — and that nature exists just as much on our decks and outside our front door as it does along a beach at sunrise.
Nature is making its presence known to us in ways we’ve never experienced. Seeing nature around us — or traveling to it — to take in its beauty, its colors, its grandeur and diversity is one thing.
But now we are feeling nature, in an intuitive way. The seasons are changing — but not in their usual patterns. Summers are longer, the hottest days are hotter, the once-in-a-century storms happen every few years.
Rains flood our yards, streams and roads, and even the infrastructure that delivers us water, sadly sometimes too dirty to drink. Wildfires threaten our homes, and toxify the air that we can’t keep out.
What we have wrought is now on the threshold.
And along with the wonder that nature inspires is a sense of dread and fear.
We didn’t do well enough with a sense of wonder. We exploited and destroyed, we consumed for pleasure, ease and luxury.
Maybe the fear that nature is instilling within is will be the warning we long ignored, a warning that will not be nature’s last, but ours.
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Previously Published on Medium