Mary Oliver says that the trees save her

Mary Oliver says that the trees save her, and daily. I used to think that was a little cliche. 

But today I was driving through my hometown and I was thinking about all the ways that I am not seventeen-year-old me, or maybe how my life isn’t anything like the life I had when I was seventeen. And I was thinking about about how it was the mountains that pulled me out when I felt entirely alone and directionless, lost in the hurt of my hometown and the house I grew up in.

It was never religion or college or parents or live music or whatever else I prayed to all those years. But it was most definitely Mount Falcon with my best friend, hammocking at whatever that trail near the mac and cheese place was called, Echo Lake, and riding out the car windows coming down the pass. It was ripping our Jeeps around in the mud, sliding down little waterfalls into freezing snowmelt, and sitting on a rock at the sunrise drinking a cup of coffee my sister made with water from a glacial lake. It was sweating up hills for 500 miles on the Colorado Trail. And it was the sense of god on the river. And swimming. And sharing fourteener summits with so many people. 

I’m not sure the moment everything changed. I don’t think it was just one moment, maybe more the accumulation of every single time nature seemed to give meaning to my life. I guess what I’m trying to say is maybe it’s cheesy of Mary Oliver to say the trees save her every day, but when I really think about it, there is not even close to another explanation for the intense, beautiful meaning that has come into my life between when I was seventeen and now. And when I say beautiful I mean it in the most real, profound sense of the word you can really think of. Every part of my life has beautiful, sacred meaning and I really mean that. And every explanation brings me back to the rivers, the trees, the alpine, the deserts. All of it.