It was  the 2017 KPY Retreat, I was on a nature hike out in the woods with a small group of attendees and I started talking to L.P. Nut: “I can’t stand New York”, I said, “I hate it so much. The people are so rude, they make so much noise, especially the hoking, it is unbearable and the the filth, the way people litter and trash stuff, it is overwhelming…I don’t know what to do, being there makes me so angry.” L.P Nut nodded. A few moments later, he asked me, “Alana do you hear that noise?”  There was a chorus of birds loudly tweeting so I replied, “The birds? Of course.” We walk a few more paces and then L.P. points to a pile of decomposing leaves, “Do you see that pile? Isn’t it dirty?” “Well yes,” I must admit that it is. “Do these things bother you?” L.P. asked me. When I said no, he asked me why? “I guess it is because these birds and leaves are a part of nature.” At which point LP asked me one final question: “Aren’t humans part of nature too?”

In my mind, New York was an abomination, an ABSOLUTE affront to the natural world, to the way things should be and people should live.  This was a ‘fact of life’ that had nothing to do with me; I was just an observer of  NY’s obvious faults, OF COURSE I was perturbed by needing to live with them, who wouldn’t be? But LP’s questions forced me to acknowledge that I was a biased observer, that I was filtering my view of New York through the lens of my own standards.

For me, a car honking is unbearable noise, but a bird tweeting is a soothing lullaby. An overflowing trashcan is filth but a decomposing pile of leaves is ‘the circle of life’. A naturescape and all its animals are good and wholesome while a NY cityscape and all its people are some kind of perversion. These are my arbitrary standards, not innate truths of this world.  Before my conversation with LP, on some level, I was seeing myself as a passive victim forced to live in a state of continual hate and anger– but afterwards  I got the first inkling of understanding that I was in fact the cause of my hate and anger.