My Botanical Romance

A life story of fascination and coregulation with the natural world ⟶

From my earliest formative memories, I’ve found my truest sense of belonging not in crowds or classrooms, but in the quiet company of the natural world.

As a child growing up in Vermont - a seventh-generation Vermonter, born to the same hills that held my ancestors back to the Revolutionary War, I learned to feel held by the Earth itself. I spent hours wandering fields and forests, finding companions in trees, stones, and streams. Nature became my first language, my first mirror, my first sense of home.

I didn’t have the words for it then, but what I was experiencing was coregulation - a steadying of my nervous system through the constancy of the living world around me. When the human world felt unpredictable, the Earth was not. The rhythm of wind through leaves, the way light shifted across moss, the scent of soil after rain - these were the forms of love I understood. They taught me what it meant to belong to something vast, patient, and alive.

The Comfort of the Living World

As a lonely child, I often felt unseen, but the world outside always seemed to see me. It was there that I learned to listen, really listen, to the subtler voices of life. The chickadee announcing snow. The hush of winter branches before a storm. The way dandelions seemed to lift their faces toward me in recognition.

There was something profoundly regulating about it, even then. Nature didn’t ask me to perform or improve. It simply received me. My body learned to match its tempo: slower, steadier, attuned. In its company, time loosened its grip.

Minutes became porous. I could lose myself in the pattern of fern fronds or the way sunlight rippled through a river’s skin. I think that was my first experience of the sacred—the sensation of stepping outside of clock time and into the eternal.

The Perennial Thread of Place

Even now, when I walk some of the same land my ancestors did, I feel them close. I imagine my great-great-grandmother standing by the same creek by the schoolhouse where she taught, hands in the same cold water. I sense the presence of those who came before me in the trees that have re-grown from their logging operations. I lay eyes on the very plant - ancestors, the new, perennial generations of the very plants they witnessed: trillium, milkweed, goldenrod - each one a knowledge-keeper, a witness.

Sometimes I’ll pause before a plant I’ve seen a hundred times and realize it’s been standing in this soil far longer than I’ve been alive. It might have nourished deer and pollinators, healed human bodies, or offered medicine to those who lived here long before my family ever did. I think about the Abenaki and other Indigenous peoples whose relationship with this land was reciprocal, reverent, medicinal. I think about how every culture, at its origin, understood that relationship with the Earth was not optional - it was survival, spirituality, and science braided into one.

There’s something humbling about that lineage. It reminds me that I’m part of a continuum of human and non-human life, all intertwined in a single living system that predates any of our stories.

Communion with Nature

In my adult life, this relationship has evolved into something that feels less like observation and more like communion. When I create art - especially my cyanotype and textile work - I’m not simply depicting nature; I’m in dialogue with it. The sun itself helps make the work, developing the images through its own light. I am, quite literally, collaborating with the elements and other life forms.

Every piece begins as a conversation between my hands and the natural world. Ferns, flowers, and leaves become not just materials but messengers. They remind me that beauty is not meant to be extracted or possessed - it’s meant to be participated in.

This communion is what keeps me anchored. It’s what allows me to remember who I am when the world feels fractured or synthetic. In these moments of co-creation, of communion, I feel myself returning to that same calm I knew as a child in the woods. The difference now is that I understand it: this is not escape from life - it is life, in its most honest form.

Timelessness and the Pull to Return

In this sacred communion with nature, time dissolves. I forget to check my phone, my watch, even my own thoughts. There’s a sense of levity that arrives when you are fully present with the living world - a sense that all generations are somehow overlapping. Of course we know this to be true - that time itself isn't real - from our friends in Astrophysics.

I often think about the earliest humans - how they foraged, healed, and worshipped through their relationships with plants and seasons. How each plant, even the smallest, carries centuries of memory within it. When I kneel beside a patch of wild violets or watch milkweed pods open to the wind, I can feel that pull within me too: an ancient recognition that this, right here, is where we come from.

No matter how advanced or distracted we become, the impulse to return to that belonging never leaves us. It is written into our DNA, into the soil beneath our feet, into the longing we can’t quite name.

An Invitation to Belong Again

You don’t have to live in the countryside to experience this. Nature is never as far away as we think. It lives in the cracks of sidewalks, in the dandelions pushing through parking lots, in the sky that stretches above us all. You can find communion in a single leaf, a houseplant, a window breeze. What matters is the attention you bring—the willingness to slow down enough to listen.

This kind of relationship isn’t about becoming someone new; it’s about remembering who you already are. It’s not the domain only of the “earthy” folks or the “spiritual seekers” It’s the inheritance of every human being. You are not in it, you are of it.

To live in connection with nature is to live in connection with yourself. It’s to remember that you are also a living, breathing expression of the Earth - an ecosystem of your own, which is a fractal in a bigger ecosystem. When you allow the natural world to hold you, you may begin to receive what you have not been taught, what has been hidden dormant within you. You may, without even trying, begin to hold yourself with the same gentleness.

That’s co-regulation with nature. A return to belonging and communion ("close intimate connection with"). A return to homeostasis, and the heart of what it means to be alive.

Explore the art, writings, and offerings inspired by this ongoing communion with the natural world at PerennialHeart.com.