The Outside is Inside

Wilderness within you, being named, and merging metaphors.

I had not intended to publish this piece beyond sharing it with a few of my friends. However, just this week the musician Parker Millsap released an album that made me reevaluate my decision.

I’ve been a fan of his music for some time and I admire his willingness to try new things, be himself, tell stories, and speak from his heart. The album he released this week is called Wilderness Within You and that so happened to be what I had written about a few months back. So, below you’ll find the title track of his album and my own piece of similar themes entitled, The Outside is Inside.

The Outside is Inside

I like to be outside. But the kind of outside where I pay attention to being outside, not the transitional kind of outside. The kind of outside where I can be in communion with the harmony of creation. I like to be outside so I can be a nature mystic–listening, learning to be, and free. 

One of my favorite outside things is trees. I don’t have a favorite tree, and I’m not privy to only standing in awe at tall trees. Even small, wallowy trees remind me of what speaks beneath the surface. Trees, like me, are thirsty to be rooted. Trees, like me, grow slow. 

Howard Thurman talks about how trees, especially trees that grow in coastal climates, learn to “bend with the wind” during violent storms. I like trees but I don’t much like the storms that bend me. I’m not flexible as it is, so the torrent of a wind all blustery makes it feel like I’m being forced to touch my toes. This is uncomfortable, but also vulnerable. Will I break? 

Lerita Coleman Brown reminds me, via the insights of Thurman, that “trees also form communities.” Trees have friends. Trees, in fact, need friends or they will not survive. Trees may appear isolated, swaying and growing, but they are not alone. 

Communicating in some unidentifiable language, trees chat beneath the dirt, spurring each other upward. “Grow deeper” they seem to shout, muffled to our overrun ears, as they strive to reach for what is only reachable with a certain depth. 

Howard Thurman wrote, “Then there begins to be a stirring deep within the heart of the tree.” He’s talking about a tree entering into a season of flourishing after a long, cold winter. Sometimes it feels like the winter of the soul lasts forever and I’m left wondering if anything will stir this heart of mine. For instance, I acknowledged to my therapist just the other day how I feel like a cloud of sadness lingers very near. She asked, “Like it’s covering you?” And I get the question, because of course a cloud covers things. I mean, we literally call it “cloud cover.” So I responded, “Yeah.” But really I meant, “No.”

To tell the truth is hard, but like a tree, I felt a stirring deep within my heart and finally said what I meant. My winter is like a cloud of sadness living inside of me. I like to be outside so much that the outside elements moved inside and now the winter storm of sleet and wind and cold is in my heart. There, at that moment, I was given a vision. 

I was back in my dorm room in 2004 trying to write a song with all my late-teenage angst, trying to say with my voice what lived in my chest. All those years ago I wrote a song no one will ever hear or remember or care about, but it is the song of a cloud, and the cloud is always there, bleeding gray. 

The cloud of sadness is always there because being sad is part of being human, and probably even part of being a tree. And sometimes my cloud is partly cloudy and sometimes the sun washes it away and sometimes I grow slow and sometimes my leaves turn yellow, falling to the ground, and sometimes my branches snap and sometimes flowers bloom, if only for a day, and sometimes its a thunderstorm, all bluster, no lightening and sometimes I like to be outside so I can be a nature mystic–listening, learning to be, and free. And sometimes I am.