Any time I’ve been unwell the moment I step outside I feel a blanket of uneasy wash away. The outside air just feels different. It feels healing. There are many ways to label what nature can do for our physical, mental, and spiritual health, but for me it feels like a transitive medicine.

A healthy, robust ecosystem, cared for and nurtured by its inhabitants, imbues a stronger sense of healing, and I am made well by nature. An ecosystem in disrepair requires us to heal with it, but if it is struggling to survive, there is little left that it can impart upon those seeking connection to nature. Therefore, we must be the stewards who give care to the lands in exchange for the promise that the Earth will become the home our bodies need.

How much of the land around us, however, has been scorched and defiled by human activities from mining to farming to the abundance of strip malls and suburbs? I feel a solastalgia for these spaces, even though I have never known them any other way. My imagination allows me to envision what Maryland looked like before we bulldozed so much of it for homes and industry and before we sprinkled the lands with blight and disease, killing off native species and replacing them with invasive plants that choke out the rest.

The pockets of forests and meadows that have been protected around us still hold within them those transitive healing properties. It doesn’t require a name or an identity to be known or felt by us all. Every day that we hike the trails, we encounter others along the way, always smiling and looking lighter – even if they are red faced and sweaty.

I believe that we are often a reflection of our environments and our exteriors can never fully hide the scars we carry inside. Our nation, in this very moment, is exposing the pain we, as a people, are carrying within a collective Self and reflecting the illness and blight within our ecosystems. I don’t know how we get there, but it is my hope that people spend more time outside, appreciating the vast and diverse lands to which we are privileged enough to access. Notice how much it has changed in our lifetimes and grieve what has been lost.

Sit with nature and allow it to heal you and in return give it the care it deserves. Growing up we were taught that we have this one planet – we are so perfectly evolved to live here – treat it with kindness and love.