City Jerk Makes It Into Nature

Things Some City Jerk Might Say When He Gets Into Nature

"Sometimes, I forget what trees smell like, you know?"

"I just want to go to where Taco Bell hasn't."

"Guys, nature is like losing yourself and finding yourself at the same time. Like an only child playing hide n seek."

"Let's live out here!"

"This is so real.  This is a realer real.  Like what I'm dealing with in the city seems real but then I get out here and all that fake real peels away.  This is my real now."

"Can I crap anywhere?  Will the animals eat my turds?  If you eat turds do they become instant turds? Like a digestive HOV lane?"

"We should just get naked.  We should do this hike with the wind at our buttcheeks."

"I saw Into the Wild.  Let's not eat those mushrooms."

"Nature is ah-mazing! Robinson Crusoe was so lucky!  So was Castaway Tom Hanks!"

"What kind of bird was that? Nobody knows?  NOBODY knows?!"

"I'm so sick of City Me.  Let's kill him.  Who wants to enter into a murder suicide pact with me?"

"Who's going to help me check my nethers for ticks?"

"I'm so glad my phone gets no service here.  It's so freeing.  It's so nice to unplug...do you think the world is okay?  How will we know?  We can't. Because you took us into Deliverance rapetropolis. The real people in the cities could all be nuclear ash but we're stuck in a place god can't even see with no way to...twitter update! Oh, John Mayer!"

"Ew! Get it off me! Get this nature off me!"

My Nature

Here's something I've been trying to explain for years.  Friends have heard this in snippets but I finally sat down to compose my thoughts on it.  Here's the other thing about it.  Critical writing is not my strong point.  I don't venture into it much and I would say it's my weakest writing.  So forgive a little.

NATURE

Nature doesn't do it for me.  It's a nice excursion.  It's a change of pace.  But it's not my thing.

It doesn't relax me or make me a better person. I don't miss it when I'm not around it.  I don't want to rush right back into it when I leave it. I'm not a Romantic Poet who sits opining on some hillside absorbing the ether of knowledge and beauty.

Now I can appreciate beauty.  Natural forms.  The asymmetry of trees and mountains. The endlessness of water.  When it comes to nature, I prefer waterways, lakes, oceans.  If I had to live in it, I would choose to live on a lake in a deciduous forest.  That's the Michigan in me.  That feels like home.

But I'd rather be in a city.  I like built things.  I like to see the workmanship of hands.  Work of people that I can reach out and touch. I believe in God.  I believe in the beauty he's created.  But I can't create it.  And what I can't create doesn't interest me.  I have to learn the lesser forms before I can learn the higher.

This is not to take away from God.  Or that I appreciate God any less.  I'm in awe at the rock structures of Monument Valley.  At a beautiful lake surrounded by mountains in Glacier National Park.  I've seen the Northern Lights twice and it was deeply moving.  I'm speechless at the delicate knife's edge of balance that keeps this world together and us all living on it.

But at my core, I'm a creator.  (And I don't know God's core, but I know that he is a creator, too. Capital C, in fact.)  I don't have enough time on Planet Earth to do the things I want to do.  I don't have the time to make all the things I want to make.  So since I don't have time to learn how to create everything,  I just spend my time on a few things.  And that is what makes me, at my core, happy.  Creation.

So mountains, trees, the complexity of life, in a way, frustrate me.  They're beyond me.  It's like studying painting your whole life just to find out that compared to the master, you are a child.  A scribbler.  So I'd rather spend my time on forms I can understand.  The art of man.  Our constant and ceaseless tribute to the greatness of God.  Poetry, Comedy, Drama, Paint, Sculpture, Architecture, Sport, Film, Photography, Dance, Science, Mathematics.

I wouldn't call them lesser forms.  I believe they are God's form of art as well and that they were given to us.  And I don't think God is a jealous being that demands all of our art be representations of him.  That we spend all our time writing hymns and painting religious iconography.  I believe that all art, whatever is created, is a representation of him.  And I believe that pleases God.

So if I had my druthers, I prefer to spend my time here. In words.  In thought.  In constant exploration of the mystery around me.  I don't need to go to Nature to see it.  I already see it.  I'm deep in the woods of it.

I don't hate being outdoors though. So, please, ask me to go camping.  Please ask me to hike and to canoe and swim and fish. I love adventure.  Just know that my life is right at my fingertips.  This is the place I meet with God the most.