Most of my childhood was spent outdoors. The kind of upbringing a farmer’s daughter would naturally expect.
Years on the farm, working outside, living for my horses. I learned early that nature doesn’t hurry. It simply exists. That kind of stillness felt normal then. Unrushed and unremarkable in the way that things only feel when you’re too young to know they’re worth paying attention to.
Somewhere between growing up, growing busy, and growing disconnected, I lost touch with it.
A Quiet Realization
For years I imagined what it might feel like to actually unplug. To spend time in the parks I talked about constantly but never quite made it to. Trip after trip pulled toward big cities and coastlines. Travels I’m grateful for, and yet I came home from most of them feeling a little misaligned. Like something hadn’t been addressed.
When I finally changed direction, something opened up.
Standing at a trailhead in Grand Teton National Park with my partner pointing out rock layers like old friends, I felt it immediately. That familiar sense of grounding. Of remembering who I was before life slipped into autopilot. A quiet relief in being reminded how small we actually are, and how little that smallness asks of us.
That day, hiking became something more than a walk outside.
Finding Slowness Again
I didn’t fall in love with hiking for the recreation alone. I fell in love with how it slowed me down.
At first I approached it the way I approached everything else: with a goal. Miles tracked. Elevation gained. Trails completed. Another item on a checklist I hadn’t stopped to question.
But nature has a way of offering perspective without asking for anything in return. The more time I spent outside, the more I noticed how unnecessary the need to achieve and perform really was. I wasn’t out there to prove anything. I was out there to remember what it felt like to breathe without an agenda. To hear wind without interruption. To feel the ground and let that be enough.
It felt familiar. Like something I had never truly lost, only set aside for too long.
What Nature Keeps Teaching Me
The more time I spend outdoors, the more I understand that nature isn’t an escape. It’s a return.
Every trail, every long drive through open country, every morning that starts before the crowds arrive brings me back to the same place. The connection I’d been searching for wasn’t somewhere out there. It had been here with me the whole time.
My partner reads the earth’s layers the way other people read rooms. As a geologist, he sees time and pressure in the rock, the slow accumulation of force into something solid. I’ve started to see our life that way too. Slowing down has layered things differently. Softer. More deliberate.
Coming Home
I didn’t find hiking and nature to reinvent myself.
I found it to remember who I already was. A girl who loved the smell of rain, who studied animals with quiet curiosity, who felt a sense of belonging in vast, open land.
Time outdoors didn’t change me. It just gave me enough space to hear myself again.
