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Hi Sequins, it’s Max. How’s your summer going? The calendar tells me that summer is on its way out, but I know we’ve probably got several weeks left of delicious sunlight and warm waters. This year has been nightmarish around the US. Fires, ICE, fascists. It’s hard to not to get lost in our own heads despairing over the coprophagic morons ruining people’s lives. But just for a moment, let’s not dwell. Once in a while, I’ll have an excellent day of work. Great interviews with interesting people. Maybe a draft pours out of my head with unexpected ease. Or maybe an editor’s greenlight chirps into my gmail. Yet even on those days, I’ll step outside for an evening walk, look up to the brownish hills above my neighborhood, hear the squawks of non-native green parrots in a palm tree, and I’ll think that life outside just feels more real than life indoors. What do I mean by that? Honestly… I don’t really know. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to connect with nature and why it’s so important to me. Why it’s growing more important to me every passing year. On one hand it’s maybe a combination of reaction and privilege. I can insulate myself from the hellish political realities. I do my small part to counteract the injustices in my city. But nothing prevents me from escaping the doom of news from elsewhere. Connecting with nature feels like grounding myself in an escape that stimulates all my senses. Connecting with nature also feels to me like a change of scale. You trade your narrow vantage point—18 inches from eyes to screen, 10 feet from any wall—for a vast one. A giant rockface. An ocean or sea of grass that stretches your gaze. Our eyes can’t sigh in relief. But if they could, I imagine it’d feel the same as when your lenses relax out to the horizon. Nature also looks smaller than our daily world. The leaf that falls from a big tree contains its own patchwork of photosynthetic cells, and its own microbiome. You really can just this stuff in your hand! Maybe what’s felt more “real” to me is this constant contrast: big with small, old with new, fast and slow. The timescales in a forest are radically different depending on where you fix your gaze. A redwood may creep up over centuries. A mushroom may sprout and wither within a day. One rock may perch atop another for a decade or an hour, weather permitting. They may all go up in flames. And then start again. Now let me point the camera at you. I want to hear about how you “connect” with nature. Not just the activity like hiking or gardening, but what that activity means to you. ✉️Tell us at hello@sequencermag.com✉️ You’ll find some more thoughts from the gang below. As far as recommendations, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with Architectural Digest videos popping up on my YouTube algo. Not the AD Home Tours (which I do also like sometimes!). These are a couple slower paced mini videos really enjoyed: 🌱Inside a Hidden LA Greenhouse Full of the World’s Rarest Plants 🐸 Inside a Woodland Home Built Over Water to Become One With Nature. Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this, tell a friend. Talk soon 💗 Max What connecting with nature means to us: Maddie: I wonder about this. I try to go hiking when I can, and each time I think about the trail made before me, either organically or intentionally. Our concept of nature is sanitized, and I think it’s probably a good thing? Like, imagine having to bushwhack every time you wanted to experience nature. On the other hand, I spend three days a week on the open ocean, paddling. There’s nothing that feels more “wild” than that, totally at the whim of whatever the ocean will throw at our boat. I think connecting with nature is a deeply human experience for me, sometimes bordering on a self-centered one. Or somewhere between selflessness and selfishness; I’m not sure! Kim: I love being in nature. I like the reminder of the geologic endurance of boulders, the relentless progress of rivers, the magnitude of mountains. The vastness of the outdoors tells me to be humble, for everything in it dwarfs the scale of my petty frustrations. Being in the high country in particular helps me ground and decenter the self when I feel that I’m but a speck on the landscape. I feel insignificant yet empowered all at once. I love being in nature, but now I’m in the phase of being fixated over my negative impact on it. My pleasure comes twinged with guilt — I can’t help dwelling on the fact that my steps contribute to trail erosion, my chatter causes wildlife to scuttle, and my long drives to reach the most Instagrammable of sceneries spew untold emissions into our atmosphere. Research has shown that over-recreation leaves an unsavory mark on nature. Adding to that are the federal government’s attacks on public lands, from mass firings of agency workers who manage those spaces to proposing development on these pockets of nature. In this turbulent time, it feels like real wilderness is becoming an ever rarer thing. I love being in nature — so much so that I’m too selfish to ever stop hiking. But, at least, I think that an awareness of my impact on the outdoors will make me a more conscientious explorer — and, as a journalist, even more committed to writing about what we can do to protect the environment. Maybe that’s my way of connecting with nature: after all that it has done for me, asking myself, now what can I do for it? P.S. I wrote about these musings in further detail for the upcoming newsletter of The Uproot Project. Dan: I had never once gone hiking for the fun of it, let alone gone camping or spent any significant amount of time outdoors until I was 30 when a friend invited me to go backpacking with him in Big Sur (to replace another friend who’d dropped out of the trip). Now, at 37, I think of myself as a guy who likes the outdoors, as an outdoorsy guy. How do I connect with nature? I don’t know, that’s a difficult thing to say. I have in my 30s spent a good deal of time outdoors, had some wonderful, memorable experiences. I often think about time I spent out in the Boundary Waters here in Minnesota, how still the water was, how completely separated from humanity I felt. On the first night we had a campsite overlooking a lake the size of Central Park all to ourselves. We saw, I don’t know, two or three dozen shooting stars, only realizing later that you could call that a meteor shower. Those were unforgettable experiences, but I’ve never once “connected with nature.” It sounds like a phrase from a foreign language that I get the gist of but don’t totally understand. I’ve seen meteor showers but have never looked up in perfect silence at the stars. I am not given to seeing the world that way. Maybe it’s a form of solipsism or a failure of imagination, especially for a scientist or a science writer. I go outdoors for the peace and quiet, to appreciate the natural beauty of what I see, and most of all to be away from other people. Maybe I have a quotidian brain: I am not religious, I am terrible at writing poetry—I even came away from a visit to the Sistine Chapel feeling that it was very nice, completely fine. At this point in my life I connect with smaller things—a good cup of tea, the feeling of my cat rubbing up against my leg, a breeze passing through my tent. The outdoors is the opposite of the indoors. If I want to get away from people the outdoors is the best option, and while I appreciate the outdoors, and want to keep and protect the outdoors, nevertheless there is still some part of me that just doesn’t understand the question.
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