In nature, I found my way back home

And freed myself from alcohol with the gentle, steady love of the natural world

I used to think that I wanted to live with relentless intensity. When I was 18 years old I chose to study at Leeds University - I thought I wanted to live in a busy city, packed with students and a thriving music scene. I threw myself into that kind of life head first: dressing up and going out night after night, hurling myself into mosh pits at indie gigs, dancing til 3am in multi-storey clubs, going back to the houses of boys I didn’t know, and drinking myself into oblivion.

Oblivion, really, was what I was looking for. Escape so huge that I was no longer in my body. No longer hearing my thoughts. No longer feeling my pain. By the time I graduated - with damaged relationships and drugs thrown into the mix - my life felt like chaos and I was free-falling into dangerous despair.

My routes of escape weren’t working, but I had no idea what else to do.

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In all those years, I hadn’t realised that a balm to my suffering - a loving green embrace - was so close to me. Just outside of Leeds are the undulating hills of the Yorkshire countryside, and the Yorkshire Dales National Park is only an hours’ drive away. I didn’t realise that gentleness was what I needed.

I didn’t realise that nature, when I let it in, would hold me in the way I truly needed.

Back then, I associated being in nature with ‘outdoorsy people’ who were into climbing and hiking and rowing. Those people irked me – perhaps because I’d never been good at sport and so felt excluded from the ‘sporty kids club’. I branded them ‘uncool’ for getting up early on a Saturday to travel out to the fresh air of the countryside. While I was groggily waking up with eyeliner smudged on my pillow and an overwhelming need to vomit.

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It was a few years later, when my now-husband James and I moved to south east London, that something in me listened to the call. We had no car at the time, but would spend our weekends taking various trains, tubes and buses to get out into the natural world. We travelled to south west London, where I grew up, to visit Kew Gardens, the London Wetland Centre and Wimbledon Common. We’d get the Overground to Crystal Palace Park in winter, or journey out further to walk across windswept Farthing Downs. The Central Line carried us to Essex so we could explore Epping Forest as the red leaves fell from the beech.

I had thought returning to London would bring me the comfort I was searching for - but it was being in nature that answered the deep longing in my heart.

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I noticed, as I walked under the trees and I listened to the birds singing, that I felt OK to simply be. It was the only time back then that I didn’t have any desire to drink. There was no fear, no anxiety. There were no expectations on me. I didn’t feel the need to numb out, hide myself, escape. I felt accepted. The birds carried on about their business. The trees gently swayed, holding strong and steady. The ground supported me. The sun warmed my face. All with such gentleness.

Here, I belonged. Here, I was home.

And I had always known this; a part of me had always known. When I was a child, I would spend my summers in the garden, catching hover-flies in my fishing net and making dens under the trees. I noticed things: the little creatures in the cuckoo spit on the rosemary bush, the feel of the bark on the cherry tree. We spent many weekends as a family on Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park and so, when I returned there many years later, it was a homecoming for me. I had forgotten it all, for a while. Then I found it again.

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In my journey to free myself from alcohol, communion with nature became even more important. It was part of my gratitude practice: hearing the song of the blackbird, noticing the light glinting through the leaves. It was how I grounded myself: wrapping my arms around the trunk of a towering horse-chestnut tree. It was part of a total transformation of how I saw the world.

Growing up, I had learned to see the world as a hostile place. I formed the belief that people didn’t care about me; that I had to take care of myself and not be needy. I had to toughen up; be strong. The universe was empty and uncaring, the sky was endless, there was no God. I was raised an atheist and taught to intellectualise everything. Religion, and any kind of faith, was nonsense. If there was no evidence, it didn’t exist.

Whether that’s true or not it doesn’t matter: that way of seeing the world was making me utterly miserable. When I believed those things I felt alone, untethered, hopeless, full of despair. Once I began to unhook from using alcohol to soothe myself, I discovered an ache in me – a missing of something which I now know was spirituality. Spirituality doesn’t have to be connected to religion. It is a basic human need we have to make sense of the world, to find our place in it, to feel we belong.

Once I began to try on the belief that ‘the universe is loving’ things began to shift for me. It didn’t matter if it was true or not - what mattered is how it made me feel. And it made me feel safe. And grateful. And joyful.

I could see the many, many blessings that were there for me every day – if only I took a moment to notice them.

It enabled me to move slower, rather than at a panicked, intense pace.

It enabled me to begin to bring compassion to myself. For, if the vast and infinitely wise universe loves me, surely I must be deserving of loving myself?

It allowed me to uncover a love within myself that had always been there. I lifted so many heavy things away and saw its soft light.

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When we’re out in nature we feel truly connected to the world. We see our place in the great mystery of things. We remember that we are not separate from nature: we are nature.

And we can experience a sense of awe: at the same time as we sense our part in the complex web of life, we are reminded of how small we are. Nature carries on, regardless of whether we are here or not. The birds fly freely, the wind blows strong, the mountain towers above us, the waves crash in the sea.

We are so small, so insignificant. And so accepted, so important.

I’ll leave you with this poem by Wendell Berry, voicing our collective knowing of what truly nourishes our human hearts.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

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I’d love to hear from you - how has nature made a difference to your life?
Has nature been there for you when you needed it most?
What is your relationship with the natural world?

Please let me know in the comments below.