By Jake Haupert
One of the things I love about the Solstice is that it reminds us that the world keeps changing, whether we’re paying attention or not. Somewhere the light is lingering a little longer; somewhere else the days are drawing in; birds are on their migratory paths; the tides and the moon keep dancing and forests quietly do what they do. We acknowledge it with a date on the calendar, perhaps a social media post, and then we carry on with our day, rarely stopping long enough to ask what the changing of the seasons might be inviting us into.
I’ve been thinking about that because it strikes me that we often approach nature the same way we approach many of our relationships. We show up with good intentions, but not necessarily with our full attention. We squeeze a walk through the forest between meetings, glance at the trees while checking our phones, or spend an hour at the beach while our minds are still sitting behind a laptop somewhere else. I am just as guilty as the next guy. Then we wonder why we don’t feel connected.
It’s a funny expectation when you think about it. None of us would expect to build a meaningful friendship that way. We wouldn’t take our partner to dinner, spend the entire evening distracted, leave after forty-five minutes, and then complain that the conversation lacked depth. We wouldn’t ignore an old friend for months, drop by unexpectedly one Saturday morning, and expect to pick up exactly where we left off. Real relationships ask something different of us, don’t they? They ask us to be present, to listen, to be curious, to stay for the long conversations that truly matter.
Perhaps that’s why walking into a forest isn’t the light switch we sometimes hope it will be. The first thing I notice isn’t peace. It’s the noise I’ve been carrying all along. The unfinished conversations, constant planning, the to-do list and monkey mind. A mentor of mine, Gordon Hempton, co-founder of Quiet Parks International, once told me, “Take your to-do list to the forest, and you’ll find that more than half of them disappear.” Nature doesn’t create that noise; it simply becomes quiet enough for us to hear it. I don’t know about you, but that creates discomfort, like Mother is telling me to put my phone away during dinner.
If we resist the urge to leave, and linger longer, something begins to change. Not because the forest suddenly decides to welcome us, but because we exist in it differently. Our breathing slows. We notice birds we walked past 10 minutes earlier. Awe settles in, and wonder follows. Little by little, almost without realizing it, we start to feel at home again, but even more than that, nature helps us feel alive.
That may be why I’ve become less interested in talking about reconnecting with nature. We never stopped being part of nature. What we’ve drifted away from is the relationship, and relationships are built the same way whether they’re with a lifelong friend, a neighbor, a beloved dog or Mother Nature herself. They deepen through attention, humility, reciprocity, affection and the willingness to keep showing up, even when nothing particularly remarkable seems to be happening.
Mother Nature, thankfully, is a patient one. She doesn’t seem to mind that we’ve been away. She simply keeps extending the invitation, season after season, sunrise after sunrise, asking little of us beyond our presence. Perhaps that’s why some researchers have found that it can take several days before our bodies begin settling back into the rhythms of the natural world. That finding has always made intuitive sense to me. Meaningful relationships have never been built in a hurry.
Maybe that’s also why the journeys that stay with us most, whether they’re beneath the big purple skies of Africa or along the trail near our home, are rarely about the destination itself. They’re about the quality of the relationship we cultivate while we’re there. The landscape doesn’t become more beautiful; that beauty is there in every moment, but as we develop this practice, the beauty is no longer hidden. Nature grabs you and sweeps you off your feet.
The older I get, the more I wonder if this is what travel, and perhaps life itself, has been trying to teach us all along. The world is not asking us to consume more places. It is inviting us into deeper relationships, with ourselves, with one another and with the living systems that have always known how to flourish together. The Solstice arrives again to remind us that every season. And with each season, another offer, another chance to go on a date.
So perhaps don’t think of your next walk in nature as another hike. Think of it as a date. Show up with intention and curiosity, leave your phone in your pocket and make eye contact. Listen more than you speak, stay a little longer than you planned and see if you sense what the natural world has to teach you. Relationships have always needed time, and this one may be the most important of them all.
This article was originally published on the Make It Soulful newsletter on Substack.
