Growing Roots

How connection to nature requires attention.

Leif Johnson
4 min readMar 1, 2023

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“The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.(Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World)

I wouldn’t consider myself to be someone with a strong desire to “fit in”. In fact, I often prefer to be on my own. But fitting in with place has always been a strong motivator for me and for years now I’ve sought to develop that connection.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always preferred the company of wild things, but after moving across the country in order to live closer to those things, I can’t help but feel like I’m more detached than ever; both from the world around me and the one within me. Maybe I was naive to believe that I could just waltz out here and snap right into place…I know I was.

But there’s an emptiness in me that’s longing roots, and I can’t help feeling that I’ll find whatever it is I’m looking for “out there.”

“The wilderness holds the answers to more questions than we have yet learned to ask.” — Nancy Newhall

Yesterday I spent a few hours wandering the woods, like I do most weekends. But driving home later that day, I felt flat, once again, like I’m a stranger to the wild and always will be.

“Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilization, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place.” (Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World)

So, today, I set out with a different mindset.

I realized that as much as I may have proposed to want to know the world around me better, my attempts at connection had been half-hearted at best. They were less about connection and more about concerted movement, reaching a mile marker or maintaining a time. Head down. Heart racing. My tracks were direct, moving purposefully and rarely veering in any direction but straight ahead.

I wanted something out of the woods, but I wasn’t giving anything back. I realized that if I was going to build my relationship with this place, I need to give something in return. Attention. Time.

So, I made it a goal to not have a goal. To not keep track of time, which wound up being easy because I forgot my watch, and to just go in whatever direction the landscape pulled me.

Slowness is a mini rebellion.

I followed the sound of birds and found white-breasted nuthatches skipping across branches. I inspected newly fallen trees and listened to the culprit race through treetops searching for its next victim. Melting snow flung from branches high above as I stood still. I crushed pine needles in my hand and inhaled their fragrance. But overall, I just listened. I stood quiet and eased my way through the forest. My wandering trail continually looped back on itself, twisting and turning through ponderosa and juniper.

I had the thought that if I can move like the animals that inhabit these woods, maybe I can learn something about what it means to be connected to this place.

If you’ve ever observed the track of a wild animal their path is rarely straight. Try to follow their zigzagging trail through the snow or mud and you might come to the conclusion that they’re lost. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Wild animals move towards sensations that we are all but clueless to. Our tracks and paths in life are a hurried fever, but connection takes time and deep roots don’t grow overnight.

“Patience is an endangered species. Intimacy is a threatened landscape.” (Erosion: Essays of Undoing)

In this short period of time where I’ve vowed to listen longer and move slower, I already feel a change in my relationship to this place, and I can’t wait to see where it takes me.

“The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place, they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.” (Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World)

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Leif Johnson
Leif Johnson

Written by Leif Johnson

Wildlife biologist turned writer. This is my library of ramblings on everything from conservation to noisy neighbors.

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