The Gift That Keeps On Giving

By Sheeba Joseph, produced by Out There Podcast

Released on January 27, 2022

Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.

WILLOW BELDEN: Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.

To start things off, I have an announcement to make: I’m going to be hosting a virtual happy hour to celebrate Out There’s birthday in March!

Out There will be seven years old on March 9, and I’m planning to mark the occasion by hanging out with some of YOU. Because you are the reason I make this show.

To get in on the fun, all you have to do is become an Out There patron by March 4.

Patrons are listeners who support Out There financially, by making monthly contributions through a crowd-funding platform called Patreon. It’s that support from listeners that makes this podcast possible. 

If you’re already a patron, there’s nothing more you need to do. Just keep an eye on your inbox for an invitation.

If you’re not yet a patron, head over to patreon.com/outtherepodcast. As I mentioned, Patreon is a crowd-funding platform for creative endeavors. It lets you make monthly contributions to projects you care about. Like this podcast. Again, just go to patreon.com/outtherepodcast to sign up. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N-dot-com-slash-out-there-podcast.

Make sure you sign up by March 4 so I can send you an invitation to our happy hour!

(Out There theme music begins to play)

Next week, as you probably already know, we’re launching a new season. And before it starts, we wanted to bring you a special treat.

We reached out to some of our friends and community members who love the outdoors as much as we do. And we asked them a question.

It’s a question that gets at the heart of our upcoming season.

The season theme is “Things I Thought I Knew.” And the question we asked was: “What is one way your relationship with nature has changed in a way that has surprised you?”

The answers we received were beautiful. Each one was its own little story. And those stories were thought-provoking, inspiring, and hopeful.

We’d like to spread the love, so on this episode, we’re sharing some of our favorites. You’ll hear from Out There listeners, ambassadors, and even a few other podcast hosts. 

What surprised us about the answers we received was that several clear themes emerged. 

Some people told stories about how nature changed the way they pursue their work. Some talked about how nature healed them. And others reflected on the beauty and poetry that nature provides.

(theme music ends)

To kick us off, here are a few of Out There’s ambassadors and listeners, talking about the intersection of nature and career.

ASHLEY WHITE: Well, over the course of the past year or two, I began working for and with nature as a career. 

(sound of a fishing line being thrown into running water)

As a fly fishing guide, I never thought that I could be closer to nature than when I started working for mother nature, so to speak. And so instead of just enjoying and protecting, as a now conservationist that has to make sure individuals are truly respecting and wonderful stewards of the watershed that I need for my livelihood, has made me think about many more engagements that I may have throughout my day that could affect the space in which I work. 

(contemplative music begins over the sound of running water)

How am I teaching my clients to be wonderful stewards so they too can share the relationship with nature that I have? The understanding of that has really not only empowered me to speak up more and stronger to those that I had the opportunity to teach, but it's made me look at my relationship with the world around me completely different when it comes to recreating outdoors.  

(music continues for a few notes and then fades out)

MARY GORDON: How did I get here? I was lying in bed, feeling incredibly tense. I had felt anxious the whole week, which was especially upsetting because I was on vacation in my favorite place. I was on an island in Canada. An island that I had been going to with my family every summer since I was a baby. 

This island is remote. There’s no electricity, no hot running water. There is no barrier between you and nature — no phones, no computers, no flushing toilets — you are forced to slow down and match nature's rhythm when you are there. 

It’s my heaven, so why was I feeling so tense? 

(soft music begins to play)

I should have been on cloud nine. I was about to start my second classroom teaching job, which I felt should be my next step in life. 

The problem was that whenever I would work on my lesson plans my body would get tense. I was hoping that once I got up to the island my tension would melt away. The problem was it didn’t. It actually got worse. I was so tired of this pain and tension. 

One night while on the island I was sitting up in my bed writing in my journal when a thought came to me: ‘Do I want to be teaching in the classroom?’ 

I felt in my chest, and heard, “No.” 

It was so powerful, I was stunned. If I didn’t teach in the classroom, what was I going to do? It had been just two years ago that I had graduated from college with a degree in middle childhood education. Not teach in the classroom? This was what I was supposed to do. 

As I asked myself this difficult question, I knew the answer right away — I was going to leave the classroom and teach in the outdoors.

Things moved fast as soon as I got home from vacation. I quit my classroom job and moved up to Michigan to teach outdoor education the following week. 

I have now been happily teaching in an outdoor setting for 15 years. Being surrounded by nature on the island allowed me to take down all the barriers I had around me in everyday life. It allowed me to really listen to what would make me happy. Even though it surprised me, I couldn’t be more thankful for where it has taken me. 

(music fades out)

TESSA PETERS: When I was little, my parents always had a garden. And I grew up in a rural agricultural community, but I never saw myself as someone who was involved in agriculture. I was interested in science and biology and genetics, and all kinds of other science, including physics. I got a bachelors in physics. Spent a lot of time working as a geo-physicist.

And then as I got older I felt this sort of draw back to agriculture, and found myself working more and more outdoors, on the land, and asking people about where their food came from and what they ate. And all of a sudden there I was getting a PhD in an agricultural field, and spending lots and lots of time walking down corn rows and learning more and more about the agricultural roots from which I really came, but didn't identify with until much later in my life.

(charmingly hopeful music begins to play)

TIFFANY DUONG: Nature went from being a sometimes escape from my life to being the driving energy of my life. 

I used to go to the oceans  to feel more alive, for blips of time away from the office. Now as an explorer, writer and science communicator, those beautiful places ARE my office. 

I always dreamed, but never imagined, that this could be my life. And I am so much happier than I thought possible.

WILLOW: The voices you just heard were Ashley White, Mary Gordon, Tessa Peters, and Tiffany Duong. 

Ashley and Tiffany are both Out There ambassadors. Tessa and Mary are listeners who have been helping us spread the word about Out There by referring friends to the show.

I have links to some of the exciting things they’re working on in the show notes.

(music fades out)

The next couple of anecdotes you’re going to hear are about the ways nature can heal us in surprising ways.

EVAN PHILLIPS: In my early 20s, I was a full-time mountain climber. It defined who I was.

During the summers I worked as a guide, taking people on expeditions up Denali in Alaska. And in the wintertime, I lived out of my vehicle, mostly rock climbing in the desert. It was a simple time, filled with one adventure after another. 

But when I was 27 years old, I sustained an injury that effectively ended my climbing career.

(melancholy music begins)

So for the next 10 years I was depressed, and I was angry. I sold all my climbing gear, I stopped hanging out with my old friends, and I guess you can say I engaged in a fair share of hurtful and self-destructive behavior. I was in a dark place. 

But as the years passed, I started to come out on the other side. I realized that through all the pain and sadness, what I’d really been experiencing was grief.  And ultimately the thing I needed to do was forgive myself. 

So today I might not be able to climb mountains, but I can still appreciate them. 

And today I’m grateful just to experience nature in a new way, whether I’m camping, sitting quietly by a river, or watching a squirrel just run around in the trees. 

Although I’ve taken my own path in the outdoors, what I do know is that nature has helped me heal, and it will always be a central and integral part of my life. 

WILLOW: That was Evan Phillips, host of the podcast The Firn Line. The Firn Line is a storytelling podcast about the lives of mountain climbers. Evan weaves together taped interviews, thoughtful narration, and original music to craft episodes that transport listeners across the human side of mountain exploration. The Firn Line just started Season 5 in January, and you can find them at thefirnline.com.

(birds singing) 

Evan is not the only one to find healing in nature. Here’s Nicole Christina, a psychotherapist and the host of an interview podcast called Zestful Aging. 

NICOLE CHRISTINA: During one very difficult time in my life, I was on one of my favorite wooded trails in upstate New York with my dogs.The rocks there are covered with moss and lichen — after it rains it just looks like an ocean of green. 

I had just received a diagnosis of breast cancer, and I was feeling so much grief I felt like I would explode. 

(quiet music begins to play)

Then I had an idea. As an avid knitter, I use hand-painted yarns. Their beauty speaks to me. 

The next day when I returned, I brought some of that yarn with me balled up in my pocket. I started tying pieces of my yarn around the trees that I felt particularly drawn to. It’s a kind of way to mark these feelings, and it was a way of asking these trees to help me process my overwhelming grief.

I walked from tree to tree, down my wooded trail, tying my colorful yarn, and thanking the trees for being part of my healing.

WILLOW: Again, that was Nicole Christina, host of the podcast Zestful Aging. You can find her show at zestfulaging.com.

(music fades out)

To wrap up, we have two stories that are brimming with gratitude about the ways nature keeps on giving.

SHANNON PRINCE: When I moved to my White Plains, New York apartment a few years ago from out of state, the sales department pointed out local amenities to me: a library a quick walk in one direction, a street a few blocks off that offered restaurants from every ethnicity, and tucked away in a slip of woods, hidden like an engagement ring in a flute of champagne, just five minutes away, was a river. 

(sound of a river flowing and then soft, cheerful music begins)

It was a wonder to me, so delightfully convoluted and improbable that just the description of it was fit for picture book prose — a forest in the city, a river in a forest. 

Back then, I didn’t know the Coronavirus was coming. I didn’t know how green spaces would become our safe places. I didn’t know a river could transport you, even if you never floated away on it. I didn’t know that the peace of still water was no more impressive than the dauntless fortitude of current. 

I didn’t know how even if you dared not wade inside — because it is afterall a city river, impure — a river can still wash you clean of the debris of a world broken apart. I’d heard that you could never enter the same river twice. I didn't know that you could never be the same after living beside a river.   

(music slowly fades out as the sound of ocean waves crashing begins)

SHELBY STANGER: The biggest way my relationship with nature has changed is just how much nature continues to give and teach. Not just to me, but everyone I interview, and even my own family. 

For example, I recently taught my niece and nephews how to surf. And my niece, she’s seven, she says gratitude to mama ocean every time she gets near the water. It’s so cute. She thanks mama ocean for being so pretty, and so fun to play with, and for having fishies, and for keeping her safe. And it’s just really joyful to watch.

(easygoing music begins)

I recently interviewed a woman, Diana Helmuth, who’s a backpacker. She wrote a book about being a pretty below-average but enthusiastic backpacker. And I love that she said, “The best part about nature is it doesn’t give a shit about you. But it makes you give a shit about yourself.” I think that nature has that ability to do that to you when you do something hard in it. 

Sometimes nature is hard and scary. I mean I recently saw a shark while I was surfing, and that was terrifying, but all I know is I continue to feel more at peace, and like all is right in the world when I am in the trees, or even out in the surf, and ideally when I see a dolphin rather than a shark…but I guess sometimes in some ways even when seeing a shark, because I just feel so much more alive. And I’m just grateful. So my relationship with nature, the only way it's changed is it’s just gotten better, and I’m more grateful to it than ever. 

(music fades out)

WILLOW: The voices you just heard were Shannon Prince and Shelby Stanger.

Shannon is an Out There listener. She’s also a writer, and she’s had a story on Out There before. Her episode was called “Forest as Pharmacy”, and I have a link to it in the show notes.

Shelby is the host and producer of an award-winning podcast from REI Co-Op Studios, called Wild Ideas Worth Living. Wild Ideas Worth Living is a show with high-impact interviews for those who love adventure and the outdoors. They release new episodes weekly on Tuesdays, so be sure to check them out wherever you listen to podcasts.

Thank you so much to everyone who contributed to this episode. We’re so grateful to have a community of listeners and fellow podcasters who are willing to share their stories with us.

I have links to all the various podcasts we’ve mentioned in the show notes. And I’ve also included info on where you can find our ambassadors and other contributors. That’s all at outtherepodcast.com.

(folksy music begins to play)

Our new season officially begins on February 3. The theme is “Things I Thought I Knew.” 

The first episode, which you’ll hear next week, is about a woman who was not outdoorsy — at all. But she ended up going to a wilderness therapy program. 

SARAH DEALY: The staff members told me I was not allowed to speak to my peers, and my peers were not allowed to speak to me, until I sat on a hill and wrote out my life story. They were not joking. I had to silently sit on a hill and write my entire life story. When I was done, I would read it to the group, and that’s how they would meet me. 

WILLOW: That story is coming up on February 3.

Finally, I wanted to let you know about an upcoming live event that we’ll be co-hosting. It’s an open mic night, and it’s going to be on March 31st at 5:30 p.m. Pacific Time. That’s 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time. We’ll be co-hosting it with our friends at Kula Cloth, and I think it’s going to be loads of fun. Stay tuned for more details in upcoming episodes.

But for now, if you’re interested in PERFORMING at the open mic night, we would love to hear from you! We have a sign-up form at outtherepodcast.com/openmic. That’s outtherepodcast.com/openmic. The deadline to sign up, if you want to perform, is February 4. 

If you just want to attend, but not perform, that’s great too! The event will be free and open to the public, and we will have a registration form ready soon.

(Out There theme music begins)

I want to give a special shout-out to Sheeba Joseph. Sheeba is our audience growth director, and this episode was her baby. Thank you so much for putting it together, Sheeba!

Thank you also to the rest of my amazing team. Our advertising manager is Jessica Taylor. Our print content coordinator is Cara Schaefer. Our ambassadors are Ashley White, Tiffany Duong, and Stacia Bennett. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold. Have a beautiful day, and we’ll see you next week.

(theme music ends on a last whistling note)