We get outside for health.
We get outside for confidence – to pit ourselves against nature for a moment, test our skills, return victorious.
We get outside for a change of pace and a change of scenery – literally.
We get outside to escape the office treadmill, to defy the hamster wheel, the monotonous, repetitive activity in which no progress is achieved – the treadmill of people we cannot fix and things we can’t control.

I think the expression, “I wanted to die,” comes from the following sources: embarrassment, rejection, failure, things of the heart and emotion, societal expectations. And those are the precise feelings I am seeking to heal when I venture, nay, when I go boldly, out into Nature.

I have said that I want to die in a beautiful place. I have also said that day is not today. And it is not. In Nature, the old will to live still kicks in. My reflex is to fight for my life. I don’t want to numb that instinctive will. When the day comes that I die in a beautiful place – I hope it will be decisive – a sudden occurrence. No choice of whether to give up or fight. But until that day, I will struggle. There is no, “lay me down and will myself to die.” While I still live, I will fight for my life.

I go out into Nature for the healing, but sometimes what I get is the scalpel. Other times the treadmill. Yesterday a friend and I floated the Colorado River from Fairy Swale (it is actually Ferry Swale, but Fairy has more scope for the imagination) to Lee’s Ferry. The word floated is misleading. True, sometimes we floated. True it was downstream. Words like halcyon, bucolic, tranquil, serene, placid – even chillaxing came to mind. But there is also wind on the river, wind that blows upstream. Wind that makes white caps of the water. Wind that grabs the nose of your kayak and turns you 180 degrees and makes you feel helpless. Wind that once again puts you on a treadmill of life you find yourself expending herculean energy but going nowhere.

The wind is regularly expected for the last mile of the route from Ferry Swale to Lee’s Ferry. Yesterday it happened three times in the last three miles of the journey. It was a three condor, three osprey, three heron, 99-duck, three extended wind-gusts with white caps and reversals up-river sort of day. And yes, the random half miles of calm beautiful floats were very worth it!

I go out into Nature for the healing, but sometimes what I get is the scalpel. Other times the treadmill. But that doesn’t stop me from returning, over and over again for the healing – the healing that comes after the scalpel has done its work.