We Go Outside to Come Home
Wherever you are as you read this - curled into a couch corner, hiding in your car between responsibilities, or scrolling on your lunch break - I want to offer you a moment of breath. A pause. A remembering. I’m writing this the way one writes a letter to someone they may never meet but already recognize: someone carrying more than they can name, someone who feels the strain of being human in a world that asks too much, someone whose inner landscape deserves softness. I don’t know your story, but I know the weight of this time we’re living through. And I’ve learned that when life becomes loud, the earth has a way of offering back the parts of us we thought we’d lost.
When we step outside, there is a moment - soft, nearly imperceptible - when the world meets us and something inside loosens its grip. The air brushes our skin, the nervous system exhales, and we remember, in a way older than language, that we are not separate from what surrounds us. As Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches through moss and reciprocity, we are nature trying to remember itself, a species longing for reunion with the very world that shaped our breath and bone. We call it “going outside,” but it is really a returning, a crossing back into relationship with everything that first taught us how to live.
Our bodies know this. Beneath the social demands, beneath the emails and fluorescent lights, beneath all the ways capitalism and patriarchy train us to override our animal selves—there is a deeper rhythm. The diaphragm expands with the horizon; muscles unclench under the sky’s honesty; the heart steadies in the presence of trees who ask nothing of us except truth. Outside, our physiology stops bracing. We remember slow. We remember porous. We remember that healing is not an achievement but a rhythm, like wind shifting, like tide, like willow roots quietly gripping soil.
Grief moves differently outdoors too. It becomes less of a secret and more of a weather pattern, the kind Willow Defebaugh evokes when writing about climate as both internal and external terrain—grief not as an isolated rupture but as atmosphere. When we sit on the ground and let tears fall where rain has fallen for millennia, grief stops feeling like personal failure and begins to feel like kinship. The earth knows loss intimately: fallen branches, shifting coastlines, fires that open the way for new growth. Nothing in nature rushes grief; nothing in nature insists it should be over by now. The land teaches us that sorrow metabolizes in its own time, and that mourning, like compost, makes something new possible.
Ecofeminism reminds us that the disconnection we feel - from land, from body, from each other - is not accidental, it is structural. Systems built on domination require our disembodiment; they rely on our forgetting that we are beings of soil and breath and interdependence. To step outside and breathe slowly becomes an act of refusal. To notice the way dusk softens the edges of the day becomes a form of resistance. To let our bodies be shaped by the more-than-human world rather than the demands of grind culture is to insist on a different kind of belonging. As adrienne maree brown teaches, nature models cooperation, reciprocity, emergence—patterns far wiser than any institution. We learn from river bend and root system, from moss’s softness and mountain’s patience, from fire’s unapologetic transformation and stone’s enduring presence.
Outside, metaphors stop being decoration and begin to feel like instruction. Rivers teach us how to move without abandoning ourselves, to let the current shape us without eroding our essence. Trees teach us that stillness is not stagnation but dignity. Wind teaches release; moss teaches softness as strength. Everything becomes a teacher when we remember how to listen. And the listening itself is healing—an attunement, a recalibration back into the ecosystem of which we are a living, breathing part.
We often speak as though nature is a retreat from “real life,” but what if nature is the truest expression of life we have left? What if stepping outside is not an escape, but a way back into our own aliveness? The quiet we encounter outdoors is not emptiness—it is presence. It is the world meeting us with the steadiness we have forgotten to give ourselves. And when we return indoors, we carry something with us—not a solution, not a cure, but a shift. A breath with more depth. A body with more room. A grief that feels witnessed. A spirit less severed from its origins. We return carrying the memory of trees standing firm without apology, the sense of river movement inside our own blood, the knowledge that no part of us is separate from the living world.
And so, before you go - back to your tasks, your people, your private ache - I want to leave you with this: you are not meant to navigate your life in isolation from the world that made you. You are not required to be efficient at the expense of being alive. When life becomes sharp, or lonely, or unbearably heavy, step outside and let the earth hold whatever you’re carrying. You don’t have to know what you’re seeking. You don’t have to be graceful. You only have to arrive. Nature will meet you where you are, the way a river meets every stone—without judgment, without hurry, without asking you to be anything other than a living, breathing part of this quiet, astonishing planet.
With care,