Urban to rural: calming my storm
With the recent observance of Earth Day, I felt it would be appropriate to share more about my personal storm (https://www.driftlessnow.com/stories-1/a-lifelong-battle-with-anxiety?rq=Amanda).
Being in nature is very calming to me. This is one of the reasons we moved up to the Driftless Area from Kenosha, Wisconsin. Having to be around a crowded and fast paced environment was not good for my anxiety or depression, it seemed to exacerbate these issues.
Living rural, I feel much more relaxed with the slower pace life. Time for me seems to have slowed down so to speak. I love not being in a hurry to get anywhere, allowing me to enjoy the beauty in my travels. If I see something that looks cool, I can usually stop to check it out, and even have time to snap a photo or two.
It is therapeutic being able to listen to the birds sing their songs and try to distinguish which bird it is (I am not a bird watcher, but we have at least 10 species that are around our house regularly.) I enjoy listening to the sounds of where we live, of people enjoying themselves on the lake that we live on during the summer, the yipping coyotes, loons calling out in the morning, to the croaking frogs and whip-or-wills singing at night. These sounds are much more calming than listening to cars zooming by, the bumping of subwoofers, or the sirens of police, ambulances, or fire trucks around the clock.
On Earth Day, I sent my sons Nathan and Brayden around our little neighborhood to pick up any trash they saw. I didn’t expect them to find too much because the Earth seems so much more important to people in rural communities. I was correct. Back in Kenosha, if I would have sent them to do this, they would have had several garbage bags full just by going around the block.
We don’t need to continue to pollute our Mother by littering, or not moving quicker towards greener solutions for the environment. There are other opportunities to make the necessary energy for the world. The world needs to figure out how to make them affordable. Wind mills and solar panels may not fit in with all of the hustle and bustle of heavily populated areas and may not be aesthetically pleasing to the eye in rural areas, but these are alternatives that already exist albeit on a small scale. I am reminded of the black soot that we would have to wipe off of our window sills and anything in their vicinity while open while living in Kenosha. Soot that was produced by the Pleasant Prairie Power Plant which closed in 2018 due to a lack of demand for electricity, or so it was reported.
We all can make a difference. Why not play a small part in keeping Mother Earth happy? We need to keep our future generations in mind. The old saying, “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone,” should strike a chord.
