I’m a little girl running through open fields in Eastern North Carolina with skinned up knees and dirt on my face. I peek into birds nests, I pick up turtles who huff at me in protest. I can close my eyes now and feel those days alone in the forest. I am there. All I want is to be able to talk to nature. Maybe in another dimension. Maybe in my dreams. I tell my family that when I sleep sometimes the orcas visit me and I can breathe underwater. ⁣

All I want is to talk to nature, when I’m with her I feel free and alive. Like in the stories I read of talking polar bears and whispering snakes and birds who carry messages. My heart yearns to speak to them, to hear their warnings, to tell their stories. As I grew these dreams became silly fantasies, things for fairy tales and stories more beautiful than mine.⁣ But tonight, as I scanned the pages of a scientific paper, I realized I don’t have to wish for another dimension. I don’t have to hope for conversations with the Earth in my dreams. That dimension is this one. And the language we use to speak to nature is science. ⁣

Listen, listen. How beautiful is this? Hypotheses ask the earth questions. She can answer with each hypothesis tested. Yes’s and no’s, accepted and rejected. Asking again and again to be sure we hear the truth. The woodland creatures can whisper to us. I can read their messages in the work of others who have learned this language too. The answers are slow, and complex, and often difficult to hear, but they are there. And it is my job, my duty, to become better- always better- at listening.⁣ I am studying to become a better messenger. I am studying to become a steward. I am a witness to her pain and I will learn to shout it out. Science is the language from which we can speak to the cosmos. So I will continue to run through open fields, with skinned up knees and dirt on my face- but this time I know I can ask, “What do you have to tell me, great teacher?”, and one day get a reply. 

Photograph by Benjamin Dunn.