I really hate nature sometimes. I get mad when, on the one day I choose to wear a skirt, the wind decides to pick up and forces me to walk like a wingless penguin to and from class. I imagine the wind guffawing up in the sky, blowing an extra little breath of 40 mph horror just to make me flinch a little. I get mad when I sit in the park on a beautiful day, and a bee decides it wants to buzz around my face and chase me until I start whimpering and running in circles. I get mad when I wake up for breakfast and find that a battalion of ants has assaulted my oatmeal stash. It makes me want to tie up each individual and unrepentant ant to a stove with duct tape as I lecture them about the importance of respecting other people’s property. I get mad at humidity when I am having a really good hair day. I get mad at lightning for making me have to cut my runs short, but I also easily forgive lightning, simply because it is beautiful. I get mad at the ungrateful turtle for biting my finger when I try to feed it lettuce, and I get mad at the squirrel for being deceptive and pretending it is dead when it is not and wasting my sympathy. I get mad at sharks for existing, and I get mad at sand for getting in my shorts. I get mad at my onion garden for not growing and I get mad at the rock I fell off at Grand Mesa that cut my leg open.
Sometimes, I want to punch nature in the face.
Sometimes, nature makes me so mad that I want to stand on a majestic-looking platform, somewhat resembling Pride Rock from the Lion King, and scream at a tornado, “Come get me, you ninny!” at the top of my lungs. I want to duke it out with a tornado, to teach it who’s boss and make it never come back and destroy things. I’m not quite sure how I’d fight the tornado, but I imagine it would involve pacing around a field like boxers, the use of a lasso, and a force field. I can see it in the headlines now, “F4 Funnel vs. 3rd Year English Major.” Well, it sounds a lot less cool when it’s written down.
I want to take the tall weeds that slap me in the face when I’m on a hike and interrogate them with the use of fire and a scythe. In reality, all I can do is hurl the weeds across the forest, and sadly watch as they flutter through the air for four extremely slow seconds and land peacefully by my feet.
I want to take my grandma’s dog, Fritz, who ate my guinea pigs when I was three, and launch him from a catapult and into the cow pond on her farm. Like a bad child, I want to give nature a good spanking for being cruel and unfair.
I get mad at the lake with a muddy bottom that made me fall and skin my toes, and feel a desire to plunge a knife into the murky waters over and over and over. I want to fight an oak tree with a bo staff, and I want to torture a hailstorm by reading it low-quality poetry. But something tells me that lake would not really care. And neither would the tree or the hailstorm.
Something tells me that nature would not really care at all if tried to get even. And so, it comes to perspective. Sometimes nature teaches us deep things, and sometimes it teaches us common sense things. This is one of those common sense things.
Regardless of what we think of nature, it’s going to keep doing what it does, has always done. It kind of reminds me of forgiveness. The person who hurt you probably doesn’t care whether you like them or not. They don’t care if you still have murderous fantasies or if you put away those hard feelings a long time ago. They probably don’t even think about you at all. And it’s hard to imagine, because like that handful of weeds, you want to hurl them somewhere far away and hurt them like they hurt you. But the only person you’re going to hurt is you, because all you can think about is a way to duct tape that fire ant, or blow up the wind into a million pieces. And eventually, you start to miss the good things, like tiny snails being born by the hundreds, like a beautiful rosy and gold autumn-colored day, like a little family of owls in the tree. Trying to hurt a person by hating them in your heart is like trying to catch a tornado with a lasso. It goes nowhere, and ends in your own defeat.
Maybe I’m overthinking, or maybe I’m trying to learn something that isn’t intended to be learned. Maybe all this talk of nature has no relevance to anybody but me, but if that’s the case, I feel like nature has bestowed a special gift on me, complete with sharks and bloody cuts.
