NATURE ALWAYS KNOWS WHAT TO DO Whether we are involved or not…
My neighbor died this past February. That means something different up here than it might mean elsewhere. He was my closest full-time neighbor, and still over a mile away. In the other direction, my only other neighbor moved, and her house hasn’t sold. I am, for all practical purposes, alone on this mountain now.
He was pure Appalachian… generations deep in these woods, the kind of man whose family had walked this land long before it had an address. He did some things I didn’t care for, but I had respect for him and knew he had a good heart. That’s how it works up here. You don’t have to agree with your neighbors to love them.
Among the things I struggled with were the dogs chained to trees in his yard and, more relevant, is the fact that he had been feeding the local deer and bear for a very long time. He’d set out food at various stations around the mountain, strap trail cameras to the trees, and drive his big pickup truck up to check on his local friends nearly every day. It was his ritual. His relationship with these woods looked very different from mine, but it was a relationship nonetheless.
What I didn’t fully understand until he was gone was just how profoundly his presence… his feeding, his dogs, his daily patterns… had shaped the wildlife around here for generations. You don’t realize the extent of it until you witness the contrast happening with his absence. This spring and summer have been unlike anything I’ve experienced in my three summers on this mountain.
The deer still visit. Fortunately, I have always been a regular stopover on their daily walkabout, and they continue to drift through with their quiet, unbothered grace. But the bears… the bears are a different story!
When I first moved in, I saw several bears almost immediately. They weren’t used to anyone living in my cabin. Then, once they registered my presence, they disappeared. In three full summers, I saw only a few. Since February, I have seen more bears up here than in all three of those years combined. And they are not fearful of humans, even the slightest bit.
There is a mama with two yearling cubs who are in the process of being officially and abruptly kicked out of her care. (If you’ve never witnessed a mother bear telling her teenagers it’s time to move out, it is hilarious, sad, and deeply relatable, no doubt.) And big daddy roams this neck of the woods with increasing regularity, lumbering through like he owns the place. Which, to be fair, he kind of does.
Now, I know that for most people, “the bear population around my cabin has increased dramatically” would be cause for alarm. The bears aren’t here because something is wrong. They’re here because something is finally right…
The artificial food source is gone. The dogs that chased them away are gone. And what remains is what was always here… a lush, healthy forest with springs running everywhere and a delightful variety of things (nature intended them) to eat. Cool breezes. Minimal humans disturbing the peace. This mountain is exactly what a bear would order up if bears had that kind of choice.
Nature didn’t need time to grieve. She got straight to work.
The trails are wildly overgrown. New growth is exploding in places that were once trampled down. Birds I haven’t heard before are singing from branches that used to be silent. The whole mountain feels like it took a deep breath and remembered what it was before we started unceremoniously rearranging things.
Nature’s resilience is not slow and cautious. It is immediate, prolific, and completely unapologetic. The moment we step back… even by one person, even by one set of habits… the wild rushes in to fill the space as if it had been waiting at the door the whole time.
We humans chase abundance so relentlessly. We accumulate, we optimize, we hustle after more. And all the while, abundance is happening right outside our windows with zero effort, zero strategy, and zero anxiety about the outcome. The forest doesn’t have a business plan. It just grows. Wild, free, unyielding..
I think about my neighbor, and how his absence made room for something nobody could have predicted. His way of living on this mountain changed it profoundly. And his leaving changed it yet again.
These days, my walks are wilder than ever. I round a bend and freeze, watching a yearling cub figure out how to be a bear on its own for the first time. I stand still while a doe and her fawn graze ten feet from my front porch as if I’m just another tree. I hear things rustling in places that used to be quiet.
And I hear there’s a cool new inhabitant who walks all over the mountain singing to herself like some kind of enchanted forest creature.
I’d want to live here too…
Oh wait. I do.
I’m so grateful.
