nature
My brother gave me a book many months ago, Nature and the Human Soul, and I didn’t crack it until now. Partially that was because I was going through a phase where I needed fiction, and partially it’s because the title of the book made it something I couldn’t read in public. But the book is much smarter than the title belies. And in many ways it revives God to me in a way that I need to hear right now.
I’d say a year of wanting something badly, so badly, and having that want come from a place I couldn’t articulate, it just felt like a biological need, and then having to wrestle that something into my life in a painful, unintuitive way that by the way is banned by the Catholic church, that has been enough for one girl. All the while raising a teenager, who is chin-deep in a materialistic society and who half the time lives in a house that is wonderful but that has many different values than ours, and so watching her split more than most teenagers are. Raising a teenager, who by nature is questioning and defying and entering territory that sometimes conjures her darker side and sometimes turns her into a stranger to even herself, that right there is enough to experience.
Then those two together: wanting to believe I am meant to have a baby, then forcing it to be true, and then wanting to believe in the beauty of children, while also raising a teenager who is so done being innocent. When I’ve been thinking of having a baby these past five months, I’ve been very aware that what I’m having is a human being, a complicated person who will someday be a teenager.
But the book puts it all so beautifully. It believes in the necessity of all of us, and it puts the dark stage of adolescence in the greater scope of a purposeful life. The book posits that what we need is nature in order to be whole — in order to gather the wonder of this world as children, and to feel connected to so many mysteries as adolescents, and to connect to our creative purpose as adults. Yesterday, after reading the section of the book on the wonder of children, I felt truly excited about having a kid. It felt meaningful, and actually joyous, and like a powerful life lesson. I then spent the better part of the day researching elementary schools that could support this ideology — which is an absurd way to spend a day when the prospective student is negative-four months old. But that’s how excited I was; how much meaning and trust I felt again, finally.
