Gary Ferguson - Eight Master Lessons of Nature: What Nature Teaches Us About Living Well In The World

Land on Fire

Hawks Rest

Opening Doors

The Carry Home

Through the Woods

Decade of the Wolf

Natures Keeper

The Great Divide

Shouting at the Sky

Spirits of the Wild

Yellowstone Wolves

Walking Down the Wild

There was a time long ago when the supple reach of trees and the whisper of water bore deep comfort. When the ringing of birds and the mutter of frogs reminded us to take heart in the fact that whatever else was happening, we were all still here, rising strong in the morning, faces to the sun. We knew the juice of spring then, surging in the wild rose and the fig, and in us toowe could feel it, as if we were somehow wed to the tender shoots, as if our own breathing was the great green breath of Earth. A time when a person barely knew where she ended and the world began. The shouts, the songs, the purring and the whirringall of it an astonishing conversation.

From where we stand now, it can seem like a dream. But every so often, out of nowhere, the thrill of that old dance judders in our bones. It reawakens sensations we had within easy reach when we were young, still wide-eyed for the world.

My own inklings of such things came during a boyhood spent in the Midwest, in a small city in northern Indiana nursed on corn and casseroles and steel. A place where nature got served in teaspoons: A garden behind our house about the size of two couches laid end to end, where I first stood barefoot and watched the comings and goings of butterflies and bees. A slim ribbon of grass where in the twilight of summer I scurried about with a jam jar, scooping up lightning bugs. And the sidewalks of Twenty-Seventh Streetwalking home from school on some gloomy April afternoon with the wind in the maples, thrilling to big booms of thunder thunking inside my chest.

Around age eleven I started riding my purple Stingray ten blocks west to Potawatomi Park, a place laced with lines of oaks and maples with trunks so big I couldnt reach even halfway around them. And nearby, a greenhouse with a banana tree and orchids and an avocado tree. And next to that, a pocket zoo with a geriatric lion, six crowing peacocks, a display of roaches (really), and a snorting donkey.

As I have in adulthood spent some forty years waltzing through some of the worlds wildest places, drifting along more than thirty thousand miles of trail through the outback, you might imagine Id think of these modest encounters with nature when I was young as, well, quaint. But no. They were big: in their own way as vital as the yawning savannahs of East Africa or the high, lonesome roll of the Yellowstone backcountry or the cold, quiet reaches of the Arctic tundra.

The lightning bugs and the bees and the giant oaks at Potawatomi Park are what cracked me open, what introduced me to the ebb and flow of the world, to the daily playlist of chirps and buzzes and snorts and whooshes. Not just piquing my curiosity, but also leaving me with the extraordinary sensation of being a part of it all. The chrysanthemums in the flower box under my bedroom window were somehow set to my own bright sense of summer. The cardinal in our maple tree wore a dazzling feathered suit that was my color of red. The mourning dove in the apple tree beside Carl and Yvonne Wilsons driveway cooed a song that even on first hearing was somehow familiar, reassuring.

No matter who you are, or where as a child you happened to live, more than likely you, too, took some of your first steps toward growing up and growing out because nature charmed you into the precious work of unfolding. Whether it comes in big helpings of the wild, or as a spider web in the corner of your garage, or even as dandelions growing out of the cracks in the sidewalk, nature calls to each of us.

And heres the thing: Despite what you might have been led to think, such magic doesnt just disappear, quietly drifting forever out of reach. After all, as we go through the various stages of our lives, we keep adding to whats come before, rather than replacing it. Wherever you are now, however urban or interior your life, nature is still there for youanchoring, inspiring, helping you become more of what it is you set out to be. At the same time, the natural world remains a ready source of essential lessons, each one helping us better understand what life really needs in order to thrive.

Much of what follows is about catching up with what science is uncovering daily about how nature really worksand how you work toousing these discoveries to help us more fully comprehend what it means to be alive in this world. But these pages are also about befriending the powerful emotions that nature often ignites in ustrusting them to guide us into the deepest, most satisfying parts of our being.