Of Nature

Call me a dirty hippie (actually, on second thoughts, don't - I wash and your insult just makes you look like an idiot), but I love nature, and it is there I feel happiest and most at peace.

I remember when I was young my parents and I would frequently go to parks, or, if I'm honest, they would drag me there. There's a park within walking distance of my house, too, where I sometimes go just to take a walk or to lose myself in a book, and where my dad and I used to fly kites when I was a child. Besides, I've never liked pootling around settlements or sunning myself on the beach with other people as much as I've liked pottering around in the middle of nowhere, without a person to be seen.

I suppose it was only after trying to kill myself for the second time that I really began to appreciate nature; I would have a stroll in the park and just admire the sun shining through the leaves of a tree or striking the surface of a pond. To me, nature is so much more beautiful and majestic than anything humans can build. Just looking at the sun setting on the water can make me want to live more than all the shopping centres in the world, and all the wonders of the Earth (because nature is a glorious, marvellous, downright amazing thing) snatch away my breath when I wouldn't even bat an eyelid at the architecture others go wild over. It probably doesn't help that I grew up in London.

And the effects of nature...oh God, its effects. Being alone in a field can help calm me or even make me happy. Being stuck in a car park or on a street, surrounded by strangers and feeling lonely in a crowd that could trample me with its numbers, eats me up inside with nerves and negative emotions sometimes. Of course, leaving swathes of nature untouched also tends to be better for the environment than razing them to build parking lots. (By the way, I know that fields aren't exactly pristine and if I could I'd plant all kinds of trees in them all; besides, we don't really need to devote that much land for the shiny shiny shopping centres and other places of questionable necessity.)

It should therefore not come as that much of a surprise to you that I'm not a great fan of people devoting acres of space to things that we don't actually need, like churches and luxury shops. Talk about the beauty of religious buildings or the status of luxury items all you want, but they cannot be compared to the wonder that is nature and that we most certainly take for granted. The sun streaming through the windows of a cathedral will never compare to the sun lighting up the sky as it sets. Expensive shoes and perfume will never compare to the sight of a beautiful flower or a striking butterfly.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that nature holds more beauty, power and wonder than anything we can hope to build or design, and that we should recognise that instead of tearing more and more of it down in our quest for more stuff. We shouldn't be complaining about being stuck in the middle of nowhere, we should be bloody overawed at the beauty of the rolling slopes. We shouldn't rush to the cities for the shiny shiny, we should run into the fields and the mountains and drink in nature's shiny and its utter awesomeness. And we definitely shouldn't take that fragile awesomeness for granted or brush it away without taking the time to really look at it.