When the Land Claims You

Spring - Week 18 - On soil, and soul, and being called home

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures — and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

[I bought this beautiful picture from the talented Lucy Campbell @ LupiArt]

The first time I crested the ridge and saw the Front Range unfold before me, something whispered: home. Not just another beautiful vista. It was something deeper, like remembering rather than discovering. Now, I understand what that whisper meant. Colorado wasn't just waiting for me to arrive; it had been calling to me all along.

There's a particular alchemy that happens when a place begins to claim you. It starts subtly, the way the first light on the mountains begins to regulate your internal clock. The way snowmelt becomes the rhythm of your anticipation. The way your lungs expand differently in this thin, pine-scented air.

That first summer, during the strange stillness of COVID, we established our ritual: each evening, watching the sunset paint Mount Meeker in hues of amber and rose. While the world seemed to hold its breath in uncertainty, the mountain remained steadfast. A silent witness to our days, keeping time when time itself felt suspended. Night after night, we'd gather to watch light drain from the sky, the silhouette of the mountains growing more pronounced against the darkening horizon. In those moments of collective pause, something was taking root — beginning to write its story into our own.

I've always been drawn to the outdoors, even as a child finding solace in trees, curiosity in bugs, wonder in creatures. But Colorado doesn't just invite connection with the land; it demands it. The landscape here doesn't only suggest exploration — it pulls you in completely. The mountains aren't content to be admired from a distance; they call you to climb, to feel their ancient stone beneath your palms, to listen to the murmur of wind through pines that have stood watch for centuries.

This land has been pulling me closer to the ground with each passing season. My fingers now carry the memory of soil beneath fingernails, the satisfaction of seeds pressed into earth. My back knows the particular ache that comes from tending growing things. My nose recognizes the scent of rain before it arrives, carried on the mountain air.

These daily noticings have become my prayer.

Just last night, as dusk settled over the valley, I spotted the first dragonfly of the season. Its iridescent wings catching the half-light, a living jewel suspended in the gloaming. The barn swallows have returned to the stables where my horses are kept, their sleek bodies darting about, swooshing past me with precision, their chattering a soundtrack to spring's arrival. In fields nearby, golden dandelions complete their cycles, transforming into thousands of perfect globes of seed that disperse in the breeze. Nature's timekeepers marking another turn around the sun.

When did it happen? When did the outline of these mountains become as familiar as the shape of my own face? When did the goldening of autumn aspens become not just a pretty sight, but a signal in my blood? When did this terrain's heartbeat and mine become a single song?

—

Perhaps it began fifteen years ago with my horses. Those first teachers who showed me how to read the land through their knowing eyes. Long before Colorado claimed me, they were guiding me toward a deeper connection with earth and sky. The way they would lift their noses to catch shifting winds, their ears pricked toward sounds I couldn't yet hear. Through daily rituals of care and movement, they taught me to notice — the quality of morning light, the subtle changes in grass and soil, the approaching weather carried on the air. They became my bridge between worlds.

—

This wasn't about moving and finding a new place to live. It's about allowing yourself to be shaped by the land. Its seasons becoming your teacher, its contours reshaping your understanding of home. The longer I'm here, the more I recognize that my body is not separate from this landscape but is, in fact, made of it. The water I drink was snow on peaks I can see from my window. The vegetables from my garden transform Colorado sunshine into the very cells of my body.

I think of the early settlers who came west, how many saw only resources to be extracted, opportunities to be seized. But others came and were humbled by this expansiveness, were brought to their knees by the intensity of the land. They didn't just settle the West — the West settled in them. Is that what's happening to me now. Am I being settled by this place?

And there's freedom in this surrender. The wild expansiveness of the Rockies has been slowly dissolving the boundaries I once maintained — between work and life, between my identity and my environment, between my mind and my body. My thoughts no longer circle endlessly in thought alone, but root themselves in the immediacy of weather, of growth cycles, of nature's rhythms.

I used to think enlightenment was something you reached through disciplined thinking. Now I wonder if it might instead be found in the perfect attention required to transplant a seedling without shocking its roots. Or in the patience needed to watch clouds build over peaks and gauge whether the afternoon storm will reach the valley. Or in the harmony of moving with horses who read your intentions through the subtlest shifts in your body.

—

The poet's voice carried across the room, and with it a question that pierced me: “Where does the I start and the you end?” It was last week when I met Colorado poet Robin Walter, but her words have already become my daily meditation. As I move through this land I now call home, the boundary between self and place grows ever more permeable. When the golden light of sunset warms my skin, is it not also warming the mountainside? When spring runoff courses through creek beds, does it not also pulse through my veins? In these moments, I feel myself not as separate from this place, but as a living extension of it. My breath part of its winds, my body another curve in the land's own tapestry.

There's a certain peace in knowing where your body will eventually rest. Some might find it morbid, but I find it grounding—this certainty that someday I will be laid to rest here. The atoms that were once my flesh will disperse into Colorado wildflowers, be carried aloft by hummingbirds, become incorporated into the trunk of an aspen. I know these mountains will watch over over my resting place, just as they've witnessed my living.

I'm not just living in Colorado anymore. Colorado is living in me. Through me. And when I tend my garden or stand beside my horses beneath the vast mountain sky, I'm responding to an invitation. The land is calling me deeper, asking me to participate more fully in its cycles, to allow myself to be wilder, freer, more embedded in the actual processes of life.

“Come home,” it whispers with each sunrise painting the Flatirons pink.

“Remember this,” it murmurs as afternoon thunderstorms roll across the plains.

“You are not separate,” it insists as snow blankets everything in profound silence.

And I am listening. I am answering. I am becoming of this place, woven into its fabric, shaped by its seasons. This land has claimed me. And I have finally had the wisdom to surrender.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let's experience nature's gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane