When Life Gives you Lemons: Seeing the sights in my own backyard

"To see the world in a grain of sand
and a heaven in a wildflower,
To hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."
-William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

I am travelling right now. Not travelling in the conventional sense but travelling in the psychological sense. I have gotten lost for hours on a given afternoon out here at my parents' place exploring their little three acres of pasture and lush poplar forest. My wonderment and amazement has been the same wonderment and amazement I have experienced in "exotic"destinations. I am seeing this bounty of northern Alberta for the first time! The diversity of beautiful wild flowers, the fantastical mushroom "forests" that pop up through the earth in the forest, the discovery of the perfect robin's nest, barn swallows, the face off between me and the deer who eat the tender new growth of the 80$ apple tree I bought my parents a month ago.... all of these things bring me such joy, challenge and wonder. I have been coming to visit my parents here in Cherry Grove for more than a decade and it is as if I am seeing it for the first time and falling in love with it. I think I've just always spent my holidays here watching "What not to wear" marathons on TLC. I am, as a general rule, a very perceptive person. However, this has really shown me how much of my world I have been missing. But it's never too late to steep a pot of tea from the leaves of the northern bluebell growing in the backyard and wander through the forest in a race to eat the wild strawberries before the bears get them.

In the Ralph Waldo Emmerson's essay, "Nature", from 1849, he postulates that the amazement and wonder we can feel in nature does not come from nature itself but that we percieve nature through the lens of our state of heart and mind. He says:

"it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both....For nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colours of the spirit."

Nature, then, and how we experience it in a given moment, could be used as an indicator of well-being. I guess, these days, I am doing good.

Acting like a "traveller" in settings that I have usually seen as banal, mundane, "been-there-done-that", has triggered a real genuine love for my home and opened up an entire undiscovered world.