It feels strange to say that a quarantine brought me closer to wild nature, but it’s the truth. When our radio studio closed down a year and a half ago, I lined a closet with blankets, connected my beloved Neumann microphone to an H6 Zoom recorder and got down to business. Suddenly I was free — no need to make the daily trek to the office, stand in line at the coffee shop or worry that I’d missed the bus home. The world was my laptop, and vice versa. But humans weren’t designed to live online. Our brains evolved, not to decode bits and bytes, but to inhale the world in huge, sensory-laden gulps.
It took awhile before I realized my brain was starving. Before I realized that I could work better and longer if I got outside for a walk, and before those walks got longer and longer. At some point they became hikes. By which I mean, they took me into wilder territory, inside and out. When you step off a sidewalk and onto earth, it’s not just the surface under your feet that shifts. You can feel your mind shift too, opening to the unexpected. Tired, self-absorbed thoughts recede and sensory data floods in — the tickle of high grass on ankle, crunch of acorn shell, flicker of shadow on leaf. The rich, sensuous feast of experience we all crave, whether we realize it or not. Listening again to our Solace of Nature episode — produced early in the pandemic — reminds me how much it matters to stay alive, embodied, and outdoors.
— Anne