"...the wild air's salubrity."

On being worth free therapy

In an admission that would get me kicked out of most Charlotte Mason homeschool circles: I have a very complicated relationship with nature.

I grew up in rural Idaho, along the eastern edge, right where it starts to narrow into the Panhandle. The Continental Divide was literally right out our back door. We were forty minutes from the nearest town, and it was only 3,000 people. The nearest big box store was two hours away. Being outdoors was basically all that we had to do for fun.

Both my parents love hiking and camping, and I grew up doing that all the time. There were days where, at supper, my parents would announce we were going camping that night so we’d eat and then pack up our sleeping bags and head up a mountain. Twenty minutes later we’d be at our “campsite”, which was basically just an open area of the mountain. And this definitely wasn’t us in a camper (we never considered that “real” camping), instead we set up assorted backpacking tents or just threw our sleeping bags on mats on the ground. We’d wake up the next morning and head back home to our normal day.

Outside of visiting extended family, vacations were almost always nature-based. This hike, that camping trip, a bike-packing excursion. I didn’t outright hate it, but it definitely wasn’t my favorite thing.

I appreciate nature, but preferably just nice walks in the countryside (I loved visiting the UK and Ireland for that!), or working in a garden. But growing up deep in the Rocky Mountains in Idaho, and living in them again now at 7000 feet elevation in Colorado, basically anything in nature is not just a calm meander in the woods. This is where people visit or move to for the sole reason of pursuing more extreme outdoor activities. My husband is an avid biker, both mountain and gravel, spending roughly ten hours a week biking (last year he put in over 6300 miles on his bikes, with almost 590,000 elevation climbed). Combine that with my childhood and I’ve always felt immense pressure to enjoy doing lots of things outside.

But other than the outdoor walks and garden work previously mentioned, the things I like doing are generally indoor things. Reading, writing, dancing, and more reading, generally take place indoors and I’m totally good with that. I know all the benefits of outside time, and sunshine, and grounding, and my kids basically live barefoot outside in nice weather...but I'm usually inside, doing all the things. And when I have free time, I want to spend it curled up in a chair reading.

I know it would do me good to be outside more myself, but until recently, I didn’t realize how much pressure I was putting on myself to make any outside time “worth it”. I felt that if I was going to spend time outside, then I needed to make sure that I was hiking or biking or at least taking a brisk walk around our suburban neighborhood. But frankly, as a homeschooling mama of seven, in my “free time”, I don’t want to do things just for the sake of the effort. So I would avoid spending much time outside, thinking that if I just kept busy with all my indoor tasks (of which there are plenty when managing a household of nine!), then I wouldn’t feel guilty about my lack of outdoor exertion.

But a couple of weeks ago, the day before my birthday, I was really struggling. We were in the midst of a long bout with sickness and I did not want to deal with it on my birthday. The kids were outside and so I randomly decided to just head to our backyard and sit on the grass barefoot in the sun. And as silly as it sounds, even though I know all the scientific reasons why, I was surprised at how good I felt from my twenty minutes grounding in the sunshine. And I decided to purpose to do that every day I could. Even just ten minutes daily would make a huge difference for me, and I can generally fit that in, even on busy days. But I realized that the biggest thing I would have to fight wouldn’t be fitting it in, but my own guilt about being outside doing nothing.

In my ongoing series on what it means to be a Godly woman, I shared that one of the results of the things I experienced in my life is that I really question my value. Most of the time I feel like I’m not worth anything if I’m not being productive, and sitting outside in the sunshine isn’t very productive. But, as one of my sisters told me, “it’s essentially free therapy”, and the other one reminded me that I’m worth taking time out of my day for. What would we do without sisters?!

So I’ve continued my daily sunshine and grounding time, and within a short amount of time, I’ve started to crave it. I had to skip several days recently due to 40-80 mph winds, but today I was able enjoy some time outside without weather impeding it. And I was excited that, as I felt refreshment creep into my body, I also felt revived in my mind, not hampered by guilt or anxiety that I was wasting time.

“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, Drink the wild air's salubrity…” -Ralph Waldo Emerson