Little Nature Love Notes
By Latria Graham
For as long as I’ve ben a writer, I’ve also been a photographer, documenting what I know to be true, even if it is just for an audience of one: me. My camera roll is a second reporter’s notebook, and I try to capture everything, to the tune of 25,000 photos and videos a year. So I started sending short clips of nature scenes as little love notes to my friends. The messages I send are meant to convey many things: I love you. Drink some water. An adventure is coming, even if you don’t see it yet. The world is waiting for you. Here’s some-thing to make you smile. Let me give you light.
I send to a friend: We cannot get away, but the birds can and still they stay to sing to us when they could be anywhere but here. How lucky are we?
So many times making and posting the videos gives me permission to get outside. On the worst days, it gives me a purpose.
This year, when it was so much harder for anybody to get anywhere, I gave into my impulse to share, hoping the sounds I put out could cut through the anxiety, despair, seasonal depression, economic angst, pandemic misgivings, and climate grief. We are forget-ting the luminescent moments, and it is no wonder given all that has happened. I post those videos to remind each of us that we are capable of flight.
I have not figured out how to capture those small moments in the darkness in a way that social media understands, but I can give you this: Winter in Denver’s Botanic Gardens, where a recent thaw allows the water in the fountain to flow freely; walking past someone’s cabbage roses in the suburbs just outside of Paris, sniffing one of the integral ingredients of Chanel No. 5; the sound of the aqua waves licking the pink sands on the southern shores of Bermuda; the impermanence of flame azalea blooms and the incessant unceasing clicks of insects in the woods that surround me; two ants wiggling around on a blush-colored camellia; an oxblood leaf sway-ing gracefully in the wind as if being held up by magic, but actually by a spider web thread. It is enchanting anyway.
What adventures I’ve had. What luck, this life. What a time to be alive. Usually people say those phrases with a bit of a smirk, but I mean them. I come from a line of women who were not taught to drive.
As I write this, we are rapidly approach-ing the coldest, darkest days of the year, and by the time you have read this, it will be over, and we should be on the other side. Because I know what it is like to try to mend the heart-break every morning by adding roses and cardamom to my coffee to stave off anguish. Sometimes it works. Some days it doesn’t. So I will tell you what I know of light because it is the thing my camera tracks when I am not sure on what to focus.
On the hard days, the light returns when you least expect it to. In this endless stretch of win-ter, I am besieged by fatigue and spend most of the day trapped in my own mind instead of navigating gardens and trails. Stranded on an island of my own making, there are days when my memory is made up of waking in the dark and lying down at the end of the day in it, liter-ally and metaphorically. Some days I watch time slide off the clock and puddle on the floor, but it’s okay because I’m still breathing and that is the one thing I need to do right now: exist.
My friends start to send their own short clips: A sunset in the Sierras. Ice climbing in Glacier National Park. They come to me from as far away as New Zealand and Tahiti, re-minding me that there is so much more beyond my door that is worth living for. There’s video of a friend traversing a ridgeline as she attempts a Fastest Known Time in Nevada. I am rooting for her. I am rooting for all of us. On the worst days, the truly dark ones, when I don’t have it in me to be brave, these multisecond snippets are carrying me. In those moments of ground-ing, the 10- to 30-second snippets, I hear my friends saying, I love you. Please stay.
