Reflection

Reflection

When I was little, I loved spending hours outside helping black garden ant colonies that were relocating in our backyard. I also loved birds, always taking care of newborn sparrows whenever they fell from their nests on our roof. These birds and ants loved my mother's backyard garden full of flowers and a bird's eye chilli tree, which I visited almost every day, trying to blend in so I could quietly appreciate the calmness of witnessing them go about their day. Both the plants and creatures never stayed in the same place, so they weren’t always the same ones I’d be with the next day, but that didn’t make it any less of a healing experience. After being re-diagnosed at 8 years old with myopia (something I thought I was cured from after my first diagnosis at 6), nature’s transient caprice is what stopped me from hyperfixating on possible legal blindness. It reminded me that change is natural, and having worsening vision doesn’t strip life of its meaning because, like nature, life can be more than just seen. In researching this, I also learned that my body’s serene response to green spaces is normal and evidences nature’s rehabilitative potential. My submission is under the subtheme ‘Healthy Environments, Healthy Humans’. Its title, “My Opium in Nature,” not only alludes to how nature helped me accept my myopia, but also reflects how, for me, nature has always been both a refuge and a source of almost intoxicating solace.