What Nature Longs to Teach Us

Last Tuesday, I celebrated Earth Day building sandcastles at the beach with my grandson, who turned three that day. As I scanned the light aqua horizon and felt the warm breeze on my skin, I turned my face toward the sun, as I always do.

Sitting quietly with the earth has given me countless transcendent moments.

Stepping away from often uninspired mindsets and the treadmill of responsibilities of everyday life realigns my spirit. It reminds me that transformation isn’t something we force — it’s something we allow.

There’s nothing more expansive or soul-awakening than nature to rouse us from the slow lull of complacency that can so easily set in.

Nature opens thought to new perspectives. It invites wonder back into our lives.

I’ve felt this magic countless times: Watching the Milky Way in all its glory traverse the velvet night sky during my first night camping along the Sea of Cortez. Breathing in the lush, rolling hills of Spain’s Galician countryside as I walked along a windswept ridge on the Camino trail. Standing in awe of Slovenia’s flawless Soca Valley — once torn by war, now a testament to breathtaking resilience. Catching my breath as a baby bear wandered across the layered canyon walls of Utah’s Green River.

These are just a few of the moments that have stopped me in my tracks on Honest Heart Journeys trips — moments where time seemed to stretch wide, and life whispered, "Remember who you are."

As I’ve traveled, nature has given me not just scenes of wonder, but moments fused with feeling — deep, life-shifting insight I carry home in my heart.

Often, sitting at my desk, I’ll close my eyes and return to one. I’ll feel again the breakthrough that rose up in me during a certain sunrise, or a quiet life metaphor carried in the eddy of a river, or the rhythm of an incoming tide.

The dusty trails, high meadows, and sparkling snowmelt lakes of the Sierra Nevada mountains were my childhood summer playgrounds. Later, with students, I would explore the Mars-like landscape of Australia’s Outback, the sentinel peaks surrounding Peru’s Machu Picchu, and the waterways that thread through Canada's San Juan Islands — each place offering its own sacred invitation to wakefulness.

And next year, with Honest Heart Journeys, my heart will find new windows to wonder: the storied countryside of Vietnam; the vast savannahs of Kenya, the lush, life-filled rainforests of Costa Rica...and so much more. What a gift!

There’s no end to the expansive views — both physical and spiritual — that come when we explore this magnificent earth.

If we’re willing to stop, to listen, to linger with her… she always has something to teach us.

Her health, too, impacts our own. We cannot separate our well-being from hers.

It has been an honor to partner with travel companies that hold this sacred connection close — companies that, across decades of operation, have upheld responsible stewardship of land, water rights, and fisheries in the regions we visit. I return from these journeys with new humility and a deeper environmental awareness — gifts from the wise, generous guides who walk these places with reverence.

As John Muir wrote: "Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest! Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God."

I hope we each open wide those windows, again and again. Stay awake to the wonder, and breathe in its fresh life. 

What balm of memory and feeling arises in you today?