Nature’s Power of Openness
How I opened up and the world gave back.
Canadians are said to be the kindest souls you can find around. If you’ve been, you know that this is a stereotype that typically will hold true. It wasn’t a Canadian, but Canada brought me kindness in a completely different, unexpected, I-just-got-hit-by-lightning kind of way.
Months before, a friend had asked if it was acceptable to invite their other friends on trips with a different group of friends. Another friend responded no, it ruins the tightness of the crew going out and can change the experience too much.
I have always had a close relationship with human connection, at times meaning I lacked it entirely, and others having multiple unrelated friend groups in the same city. Naturally, I said of course you can invite people. The opportunity to come on a paddling trip down the Teslin River, into the Yukon? In my mind, that chance should be sent out to the world.
Mother Nature welcomes us with open arms and we should do the same.
The first thing I’m told is a story about her laughing in others’ faces, high off her ass, at Beer Fest in Haines, Alaska. To a recently sober addict, it’s not an intriguing start and created a fog of hesitation. Her smile crashed through all of it and came barreling at my heart. She doesn’t really remember us meeting in the Walmart parking lot, maybe choosing to remember a different time a couple of hours later.
A lot of my life I’ve felt an outcast; people forgetting my name, not being interested in introducing themselves, always just giving a brief hello and moving on to someone who seems like they may have a story to tell. All of us that have felt alone in this way know that plain and simply, it sucks. So I got out of the car and went to sit with her as she sat alone waiting while our friend ran into the shop we would leave our cars for the next 10 days of paddling.
She turned twenty-seven the day previous, and I was preparing to turn the same the next day. I don’t know if there has been a single moment since then that I have felt her leave my mind.
To try and encapsulate the following journey would be to take on the detailing of an epic that has no light at the end of the tunnel because the light burns so strongly from within us both.
On the trip, she asked me, donned in my Mighty Ducks jersey, why I go out there. I still think about the why, as I never really questioned it before. Out there, there is space to be me because the world doesn’t care how I look, how I act, what political party I side with, or how I like to make puns more than I like to be serious.
The power of openness is out there. We are always expecting, hoping, praying, dreaming, longing, when what we may really need is just to sit and let the world come in at its own pace.
