How to Fall in Love with the World Again
Even when nature tries to kill us. Looking at you, snakes.
I am not exactly a Nature Girl™. Much to my son Zach’s dismay.
You may remember I was bitten by a poisonous snake quite dramatically a few years ago while stepping off a SIDEWALK in a SUBURBAN NEIGHBORHOOD onto a MOWED LAWN. So you understand it may take some time for me to come around.
Nonetheless, it’s true: we seem hardwired to notice beauty. Which is another way of saying that God designed us to pay attention. There is something about the world’s glory—its light and shadow, its songbirds and seasons—that stirs up the deep place in us where awe lives. The Romantics built an entire movement around this insight. Ralph Waldo Emerson saw nature as a kind of spiritual tuning fork. The stars or horizon weren’t simply pretty; they helped us realign with the sacred. He called it learning “the lesson of worship.”1
(And for any Taylor Swifties, please note that was reflected in her entire Evermore era because all things are new again. And all plaid and braids are welcome.)
William Wordsworth agreed. In Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, he wrote about sensing “a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts.”2 For him, nature was where God dwelled—in setting suns and the blue sky and the mind of man. It was beauty and teacher and guide, the soul of his moral being.
(So every time you hear someone say “Nature is my church!” feel free to remind them that this belief in our natural attunement is not, say, new. Or in conflict with believing in the support of institutions. Just saying.)
So yes. We are the kind of people who are meant to respond with gratitude and attention.
I keep trying to argue against this but there is someone in my life who keeps shoving nature in my face. My air-conditioned face. I want to tell you all about her, but also feel free to listen to this episode first if you want to experience her full glory.
Margaret Renkl is the author of Late Migrations and The Comfort of Crows, and one of those people who pays such exquisite attention to the world that you find yourself doing it too—bees, bluebirds, a skunk under a streetlamp who looks like he’s wearing his grandmother’s fur coat. When I visited her in Nashville, she had to make room in her trunk for my bag because—I kid you not—there were crates in there for emergency opossum triage, like a roadside animal ER but southern and literary.
Here is what Margaret is trying to convince me of:
You don’t need any credentials to be nature-loving—just a desire to notice. She calls herself a “backyard naturalist.”
The places that comforted us as children often become holy ground in adulthood. Playgrounds. Forts. Swimming pools. Giant holes in our backyards…?
It’s hard to love a world that is so violent. But love is an act of attention.
Air conditioning is a modern miracle. But also? It keeps you from hearing birds. So… choose your suffering. (Let’s pause to consider how far I’ve come, considering my father, Gerry Bowler, used to tell me before I went out the door: “Sweetie, air conditioning is God’s promise that we never have to go outside again.”)
Did you know there was a birdseed shortage during the pandemic?3 Because so many of us started birdwatching. I bought my husband one of those bird feeders that you can attach to your window, so he became very experienced in how often sparrows re-fluff their feathers every day.
Despair thrives in powerlessness. But when we find something to do, we feel more hopeful. So we become people who impulse-buy native milkweed to save the butterflies. My sister Amy is now a volunteer native-plant champion who goes around the city of Toronto saving the neighborhood from invasive weeds. Then she draws them. WHO LOVES PLANTS MORE THAN HER? I DARE YOU TO CHALLENGE ME.
Ordinary love might save us. Like Auden’s ‘affirming flame,’4 it’s the thing that smuggles hope past despair’s gatekeeper, even if it starts with rescuing worms from a rain-soaked sidewalk.
Maybe launching our kids isn’t always the goal. Margaret has a lovely story about how much it meant to her to have her kids back in the nest during the pandemic. So perhaps the adult child who stays in a pile of blankets on the couch is a kind of miracle too (especially when they do their own laundry).
We don’t live next to nature. We are nature. The sweaty, glorious, glandular creatures that we are. That’s the gospel of creatureliness: not dominion, but participation. Not above, but among.
Margaret makes me want to fall back in love with the world—even the parts that hiss and bite and shed their skins in our flower beds. Because maybe love doesn’t begin with understanding. Maybe it begins with attention.
You can listen to our full conversation on Spotify or Apple. Or watch it here:
And I’d love to know—what small thing have you noticed lately? A sound? A smell? A creature you’re learning to love?
Tell me in the comments. Let’s be beauty-besotted together.
My therapist has had me on a “wonder hunt.” She wants me to find things in nature that inspire awe and let myself do a deep dive into their mysteries (for example, the leaf sheep - go ahead and look up leaf sheep and prepare to be delighted). It’s been really good for me in so many ways and I’m finding that I’m more attuned to bird song, to the color green, to the power of a thunderstorm, etc.). I know the ultimate purpose is to lessen depression, but I see how it’s gifting me in so many other ways. 🙂
It's been a hard night, bleeding that just won't stop, but there's beauty to be found in stepping out the door into the cool darkness, seeing Jupiter and Venus conferring in the sky, and hearing a brace of Harleys down the road.
And then there is wood, the immersive care in working it, letting it tell me how it would like to be shaped, the heady smell of sawdust.
God's lovely trees, slowly becoming a lovely aeroplane. From where I lie, writing this, I see the parts, organic and engineered. The beauty of relevance in my heart.
I notice more now, with cancer. Some say I'm clinging to life with both hands, desperate not to leave, and frightened, but I'd like to think it's more than that, an awareness of transcendence, of beauty that does not die but carries me on the wave's crest, hanging ten into Paradise.
It's been a privilege, this, a guided tour given by the Almighty to a man who is at last ready to see.