Go Play Outside

Or how to enjoy your yard even if it has mosquitos

I wrote this earlier this year in mid-summer, but I sat in my yard this morning in much the same way, so besides the mosquitos, it still feels applicable. And it’s probably, indirectly, good for gratitude, if that’s your kind of thing this time of year.

P.S. Purchase my novel, The Way It’s Supposed to Be, with the link on my author site:

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I’m sitting in my yard at 7:45 in the morning on a Thursday. Later, it will be hot — mid 90s — but right now it is a blissful temperature.

I sit on the couch Jason pulled from its home on the covered porch yesterday, with my feet in the dewy, bright green St. Augustine.

The birds are abundant. The titmice, wrens, chickadees, which my youngest used to call “chickadee-dee-dees” after their call, before he was taller than me and I confused his voice with his father’s from across the house. A teenaged cardinal, his brilliant red just starting to spread across his body, vies for space at the feeder overhead. A hummingbird buzzes so close, as if I am not a hulking mammal but just a part of the landscape.

I smell of bug spray. Communing with nature though I may be, it’s not all pleasant. A mosquito whines periodically in my ear, possibly frustrated and being thwarted by the chemicals on my skin. The flies want my coffee. Maybe some day I will be Zen enough to accept even these insectile annoyances with grace.

The giant red-tip photinia to my right, by the fenceline — the one I planted when we first moved in to shield our yard from the neighbor’s house behind — may be dying. It has a fungus that has spread to its trunk, causing the bark to rot off. I will fertilize it, maybe treat it with copper fungicide, but that may not be enough. Next spring might find me cutting down a dead thing, chopping its branches and trunk to fit in the compost bin or the wood pile. I will be sad if that happens, but you don’t get to 48 without facing some loss here and there. I’ve learned that change is inevitable and dying a part of living; no matter how tightly we grasp, how regretful we feel, we do not control these things.

Maybe, we don’t control anything.

Maybe the self is an illusion and everything that has ever happened in your life, in mine, across the expanse of the universe is predetermined. Or rather, happening at the same time — time being the fourth dimension and not actually linear as we experience it. We humans with our limited binocular vision.

Perhaps science or math or religion or enlightenment could help us see the true nature of our world. Or perhaps, whatever else we discover, there is always something underneath and truth, for us, is an illusion. Perhaps we are incapable of comprehending the true nature of reality. If reality even has a true nature. Perhaps what we call “reality” is just our constructed world and nothing else exists.

It would be easy to let these thoughts lead me to nihilism, to self-indulgence, into a very fuck-it-all mentality. But it doesn’t. It leads me to curiosity and amazement. Because if I could understand it all, what would there be left wonder?

Wondering is one of my favorite things about being a person.

• What will happen today?

• Who will my kids be when they grow up?

• How will this book end?

• What might other sentient beings in the universe be like?

• Is determinism the truth, and if so, what does it mean if it is?

• And will I karmically pay for killing the mosquito I just clapped in front of my screen, even though it wasn’t biting me?

• What will happen as our universe ages — heat death? Snap back to another big bang?

• Are their other universes outside our own and if so, do they follow different laws of physics?

Imagining a multitude of answers to these questions, from mundane to colossal, is a delicious exercise, and I should be devastated to ever answer all of them and have nothing left to wonder.

I’m not sure omniscience would be a happy state.

This is why I sit in the backyard this morning amongst the birds and the grass and the mosquitos and flies. Nestled in the 100-year old, still-thriving live oaks that spread their branches across our yard and into the neighbors’ because live oaks don’t care about fences. Next to the possibly-dying photinia , with a cat looking out the window at me, possibly wondering why humans are the way they are and what I’m doing sitting in the yard mashing on a keyboard.

It connects me. To the nature of our planet, and then the connection runs two ways, microcosmically toward my family, our house, the fungus in the bark of the bush that has its own prerogatives. The fungus that is composed of cells, atoms, subatomic particles.

And then to the macro. Outward into our solar system of eightish planets, beyond that through the Oort cloud and our spiral galaxy we mundanely call the “Milky Way.” Onward toward the edge of our universe and beyond.

Everything is composed of something. I think. Actually, there are no universal truths. For us to sit here on this planet and say anything we know is “universal,” applying to all things and spaces everywhere, is naive. Hubris, my high school English teachers would say.

Maybe you hate camping. Maybe you have terrible allergies. Perhaps you are just not an outdoors person. Even so…

Find a way to connect with it. Put your feet in the grass, put your hands in the dirt, jump into a body of natural water. Look out the window of the high-rise you call “work” and find a tree to ponder.

I’m not going to say there is beauty in flies and mosquitoes. I mean, there is, but it’s kind of obnoxious for me to say so. And I’m not going to stop slapping them away. I’m just a sack of meat on this planet and can’t be expected to behave like an benevolent god.

Anyway, just…go outside. If you can do it, not as an obligation, if you can do it without sighing heavily, telling yourself “this is good for me” and checking the time every two minutes, if you can approach it with curiosity. What would I feel if…. What would my mind do….

It’s where we come from — the outside, the water. In fact, until recent human history, the word “outside” had no meaning. All was outside.

The birds have stilled, have gone wherever birds go when the day begins to heat up. I feel the air getting warmer and heavier with humidity. And it is time for me to take my philosophical self to my day job. My meat sack self still would like to make money, put food on the table, go to Cabo in July.

But this. This outside, this connection to where I and all of us come from and to the universe at large? It comes with me.