For the Love of a Mother

My first love was long before I drew breaths of air and felt sunshine kiss my cheeks.  It was in the womb of my mother, where I listened to her heart beating from the inside, and she was my infinite universe.  When a woman carries a child within her, a miraculous bond forms.  I know from birthing my own babes that the connection is the purest form of love possible.  Unconditional, boundless, and radiant love knits two souls together, forever.

It wasn’t until I was nine, however, that I first felt the sensation of falling in love – which for me, happens slowly and then all at once, like a roller coaster cranking up to the top, and then diving into the wonders below.  I was dropped off on an unusually cold spring day to an Audubon day camp program.  In stiff jeans and a wooly sweater, I joined the already formed group around a stone covered hearth and a pot of milky cocoa steaming into the damp cabin air.  We were going to explore a trail that day, looking for signs of spring and what was to become.  We held our hands around mugs of the chocolate as we listened to the teacher tell us about the birds that stayed behind in New England, and the ones that would soon return from their migration.  She showed us pictures of animal tracks in mud and pollywogs in ponds.  We put hats and mittens on before the creaky wooden door opened to the bright sunlight awaiting us.

In one of my clearest childhood memories, the crunch of tiny stones and sticks are under my boots as the crispness in the air fills my nose.  It isn’t really winter or spring, but somewhere in between, and this delights me!  There is a small patch of snow melting next to a muddy puddle with a violet colored shoot popping up.  A thick nubby-barked tree reaches to the sky, just as high as it seems wide to me.  With each step forward, I start to imagine I am sinking into the ground, like the snow.  It isn’t until we round the bend to enter the forested area that I notice the smell of the earth, but when it does hit me, it ignites a sensation of wanting to gulp in the air around me to hold that feeling forever.  It is the smell of dirt, dried leaves, pine cones and needles, new flower buds, a tiny creek, mossy rocks, grass, early pear blossoms, and bark mulch.  Swirling inside me, I can detect each part and everything together, all at once.  The tall trees block the sun in irregular streaks.  As the path continues, my face is both warmed and cooled with this dance of the blocked rays.  Sometimes we stop – to touch a beetle under a log, to listen to the squirrels scampering along, or to try to spot a bird.  All along the trail I find joy in each thing I experience.  My heart thumps along, my companion on the beautiful journey.

Many years later, nearly thirty, I returned to that same sensation of oneness with Mother Nature.  It was in a time and place – many physical and metaphorical miles from my first experience – where I most needed something to make me feel alive again.  I stepped into a forest this time in the heat of a Midwest summer.  The coolness of the ground was immediate.  I felt a radiation of calm from the wet and chilled ground travel up from my feet and to the very top of head.  The denseness of the canopy of leaves created a cocoon that felt like I had jumped off a tall platform and plummeted into the quiet, serene and full body sensation of the deepness in an Olympic sized pool.  I walked along, trailing my finger-tips against the roughness of the bark and the thick, low hanging vines.  I could hear the call of what seemed like a thousand birds, and the scratchy sounds of insects and creatures.  Tiny slivers of the sun broke through in blinding spots along my trail.  It took nearly a quarter mile, but then it happened – I inhaled the truly glorious smell of a wooded path, a scent that can only be described by and to those that have experienced it, and can only be noticed when you dare to pay attention to the simplicity of what is around you.  As can be common with olfactory memories, the scene changed from where I was, to the nine-year-old girl walking with too-big boots and her itchy sweater, a belly full of cocoa.  It was in this moment for me that I recognized my deep, devoted and unconditional love for Mother Nature.  She breaths, like my own mother did when I rested in her womb, in a rhythm and pattern that I rely on.  There is both a cadence and chaos to her, but I accept both.  It is with her and through her that I have discovered my life’s purpose and complete joy.  

Since that day I have hiked many miles and expect to hike an infinite number more, before my time on earth ends.  I find hiking helps anything in my body, heart or soul that needs nurturing.  It is both an expression of my love for Mother Nature and my own self-love that propel me forward with each step along a trail.  To be truly alive – to stretch my arms out as I travel through a forest breathing in all that is there – is a place in which I finally know who I am.  And that really is a remarkable gift.