I'll Meet You There: Why Developing an Intimate Relationship with Nature Means You're Never Alone The Naked Librarian

If you're looking for more connection, calm, energy, and sense of well-being — this episode is for you. 

Thank you to our podcast guest, Kai Siedenberg, a nature connection guide and ecotherapist about exploring a deeper relationship with the natural world. Learn more Kai, order her books and read her work over on her website. 

Thank you to Louis Island for the "My Home" tracks featured in the podcast. They provide a beautiful sense of peace and possibility. 

And a big thanks to Mission Flow, a marketing and automation platform for purpose-driven businesses and organizations, for sponsoring this episode. 

Kai has also generously provided a guided meditation to help you get out and explore a deeper connection to nature, starting right where you are. You can find it here. 

 

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Below is the transcript from the show: 

Speaker 1:        That thing you've been looking for. Love, connection, companionship, calm, energy, purpose. There's a good chance it's outside.

Speaker 1:        Did you play outside as a child? What was your favorite thing to do? When I was young, I loved making mud pie and playing free tag. As I got older, I played spotlight a game like hide and seek, but at night with a flashlight. Just after the lightning bugs settled down, we'd be outside searching for each other beneath the glow of summer stars. Growing up in Georgia also meant that I swam nine months out of the year and we visited the ocean regularly. I performed underwater mermaid flips in the salty Atlantic and searched for sand dollars in the early morning hours. Springtime meant my birthday, and by April, the tulips bloomed and the bumblebees buzzed. I even came to associate my birthday with a fragrance of flowers, warm sunshine and Easter egg hunts in the backyard. My mom did not believe in board children, and upon the very first complaint, we were sent outside to make our fun spending hours riding the rope swing up over the treetops and picking wild honeysuckle as snacks.

Speaker 1:        When I close my eyes today, I can still smell the autumn leaves we raked and dove into. I can feel the lift as I got airborne on my bike ramp and the memory of hanging and space and time for a moment, feeling like I belonged there in the air. Hi, I'm Victoria Payne. I'm a writer, storyteller, health nerd, and also your host of The Naked Librarian. If you're new, welcome. I am so glad you're here in today's episode called I'll Meet You There. Why? Developing a relationship with nature means you're never alone. You're going to meet a remarkably wise woman who's going to help us rekindle our long lost or perhaps new relationship with the natural world because have you noticed that the smarter and older we get, the more we want to go back and relearn things, maybe even the things we're already doing, but we want to do them with more intention.

Speaker 1:        I started the Nico Librarian because I'm passionate about helping what I call grown ass women, navigate life with more self-compassion, energy, happiness, and wonder. And here's a little spoiler for you what you've been looking for. Love, connection, companionship, calm, energy, purpose. There's a good chance it's outside. Now, I love talking to wellness experts about what they do and why they do it, and I know you're going to love today's guest, but first, let me tell you a story about why I think this topic is so important. Many years ago I was teaching research writing at the University of Portland, and no one gets excited about a research paper, so I like to surprise the students by allowing them to choose their own topic. I put a few boundaries around it, mostly because I had already seen what did and didn't work, but other than that, it was wide open.

Speaker 1:        One year I had a student from Hawaii who will call Tommy. Tommy proposed to research seasonal affective disorder, which the Mayo Clinic calls a type of depression related to the s