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Connection with nature is a wonderful thing. Everyone should experience it. I am an avid fisherman and hunter, I think it would be hard for me to function properly if I did not get that peace that I experience from it. I very rarely kill anything when I hunt anymore, I just go to observe and enjoy nature. The only time I kill is if someone needs the meat, a few of my family members count on the meat from hunting and fishing, they plant gardens as well. Its also necessary to keep animal populations in check, but a lot of the people kill just to kill, I guess they do their part though.
While I am an atheist and do not see as a "spiritual" connection, it is a connection nonetheless, and no one should be deprived of it.
I understand how you feel.
We have a farm several miles out of town, herds of cattle, deer and elk. We only take cattle as needed, the rest we protect.
We grow our own vegetables as well.
The feeling of peace is truly priceless. Walking thru the woods at dawn, mist still blanketing the ground, hearing our male elk bugle a warning to his harem to let them know the crazy broad with the camera is back again.
I would die if I ever had to live in the city again.
I can totally relate to feeling out of whack due to the immediate environment.
Have you considered that its less about your connection to the ocean and more about the overall energy of the people? Or possibly of the land and it's past?
I love the ocean and I love the mountains. I don't need to go to the ocean, just knowing its close in case I need to, I can go there. However, there is something about a mountain that has me so peaceful and clear.
I'm a Capricorn (sun, moon and mercury) so it is no wonder.
But....places have energy and we don't always groove well with it.
I lived in the mountains and when we would need lots of supplies, it was better to spend the money and drive 1.5 hours to 'the big city' and stock up. However, everytime I went to the big city (12,000 people so not really big) I would feel so drained on my way home and always at roughly the same stretch of road.
It did not matter if I had a day full of shopping or had to go there for a quick dropping off of papers, person, what ever, and then turn around....it just sucked me of energy.
So I researched something. I coincidently was telling someone about this and they too felt the same way, and as we talked about it, someone dropped off one of the local magazine/papers that come out once a month for the greater area (covers the town and all towns with a 100 mile radius). The paper had an article about the local natives and their fight over an island in the bay.
So I looked them up and come to find out that everyone of that tribe had been slaughtered upon that island, only a infant survived. The island was where the people of the tribe had their gatherings and would stay on the island for about a week and then go home.
Some white guy talked a few buddies into going over there in the middle of the night.
It's been a while, but I think it was some 200 or so people who were killed as they slept.
Horrible aweful!!!!
This is what I think is wrong with that town....or at least what effects me when I go there.
For the record, I've been to the beaches of Jersey and North Carolina (Cape Hatteras).
I enjoyed them both, although the North Carolina beaches did feel more "natural" in their surroundings. I was surprised to see tons of fish in those waves!
I am a pagan, I openly identify with the water element of the earth. I feel most at home and attuned with the ocean. I feel drawn to and a deep need to associate with loggerhead turtles, that come on the sand on the coast of north carolina and lay their eggs. I am from North Carolina originally. My favorite activity in all the world is having a spiritual communion in nature while sitting on an empty beach at dawn.
I currently live in NJ. The beaches here are atrocious. People are so abusive to the nature, they are over crowded and gross. I feel no communion with nature. I just feel suffocated, like I do everywhere else.
My question is, for a couple of years I have felt depressed and unmotivated. I feel unhappy like I am always missing something in my life, despite having a fulfilling marriage and a wonderful child. Do you guys think it could be because I am so far from my ocean?
It may be because you are far from home and the part of the ocean that is familiar to you.
I have lived in NJ all my life. The beaches here can be beautiful, but they will never seem so at the height of the summer season, when people from all over the northeast come to play on NJ's sandy beaches.
I am not a pagan, but I openly identify with the water element of the earth. I feel most at home and attuned with the ocean, and I find spiritual renewal at the edge of the water and with the feel of the pebbles in my hand. And we don't have loggerhead turtles, of course, but I am partial to the seals that migrate down to us in the winter then move north again as the temperatures climb. I am only a 15-minute drive from the ocean, so I go there at all times of year, at different times of day and night, and in all seasons. Sometimes I NEED to go.
So, I think it has to do with you not being in YOUR familiar surroundings, Dave, it is not that the water that touches the artificial boundary called New Jersey is somehow inferior in its ability to touch your spirit. I likely would not feel the same way standing on a beach in North Carolina as I did when I took this picture at dawn in Long Branch on New Year's Day, 2011.
Sounds to me like you should consider returning to North Carolina, or maybe having a second home there.
It's very normal for people to feel a lifelong connection to the place or region they grew up in.
^^^I strongly agree with this.
When I was a child, I lived in a small town in part of northern New Jersey that still had a lot of large wooded areas. I can close my eyes and still "walk" the paths through the trees of my childhood, down to a swamp where we caught box turtles and bullfrogs. It's been obliterated for decades now, and developments of large houses are in its place.
Two years ago I moved to the central part NJ, farther from Manhattan. There are still woods here amongst the housing and many more large parks with hiking trails through the woods in this part of the county.
Walking through those paths was like coming home--the sights and smells and sounds of the woods. I didn't realize how much I missed it until I stood surrounded by trees again with the light filtering through branches and all the different bird calls in the air around me!
Loving the ocean came to me in my adulthood. Now I feel I live in a place that is in the best of both worlds--15 minutes or less to be either in the woods or at the edge of the sea.
We are more connected to nature then we realize and although you may not believe it, and you're entitled to that, our DNA and that of the trees and plants around us is one of the same and we cannot survive without the trees and the trees cannot survive without us. The air we breathe in comes from all the plants and trees that they breathe out, we breathe in the oxygen that the trees and plants release into the air and the trees and plants take in the carbon monoxide that we breathe out, so you see we are more connected then you realize. One cannot live without the other.
Feeling connected to the natural world is not an exclusive possession of any one spiritual tradition or group of human beings. IMO, it's an innate part of our humanity, but it appears that this connection can be buried so deeply enough within some people that it seems that they are completely disconnected.
Last edited by Mightyqueen801; 04-21-2012 at 09:19 AM..
I try and generally succeed in treating my ailments without medication. I dont need to be medicated to be healthy.
Slight correction. You have not needed it YET. That does not mean you do not now or never will. It is worth bearing in mind and considering. Certainly do not preclude it simply because it might be a first.
To answer your question in general, it is quite possible that you are suffering from a simple, though by simple I do not mean to demean how serious it can be, case of home sickness of a sort. If I do not lose myself in the Wicklow Mountains in my home country of Ireland at least once a year I suffer from things similar to what you describe. Homesickness sounds like a benign and boring diagnosis but one should not underestimate just how powerful it can be. I have seen people who have EVERY reason imaginable to be happy where they now are... but they arent quite as happy as they feel they should be and quite often it turns out to simply be homesickness.
Nor is feeling lost or depressed or unmotivated or empty unusual in people, especially in middle age years.
If returning home is not an option for you then I would simply recommend that you start exploring things that might fulfil you in other ways. Try everything and see if it is for you, even if you think on the face of it it might not be, or it might not satisfy you as much as you think.
Growing herbs and vegetables in the garden, keeping chickens for your own eggs, building DIY things like your own stone BBQ in the garden, starting or attending a meetup group (maybe even one around the idea of doing clean up work around the beaches local to you), getting a pet, new kinds of excercise, a night course or a return to college, a pet, breeding and selling turtles, a new language.... I could list ideas all day. The point however is to find something that is fulfilling AND challanging. Not too hard, but not easy either. You should be at least slightly challanged by whatever it is. Something that is always JUST beyond, but not far, your current capabilities.
The point is to explore your life and ways to better it and challange yourself. Even if you do not find something to settle on, sometimes the journey is the destination and you will find the search itself fulfilling.
All that said however, I reiterate that a visit to a doctor, a few blood and allergy tests to check if you might be depressed, developing an allergy to certain foods late in life (much more common than you think) which leave you feeling drained or unmotivated, or more are all possibilities. A full check up and work up is not going to harm you and you have nothing to lose.
I am a pagan, I openly identify with the water element of the earth. I feel most at home and attuned with the ocean. I feel drawn to and a deep need to associate with loggerhead turtles, that come on the sand on the coast of north carolina and lay their eggs. I am from North Carolina originally. My favorite activity in all the world is having a spiritual communion in nature while sitting on an empty beach at dawn.
I currently live in NJ. The beaches here are atrocious. People are so abusive to the nature, they are over crowded and gross. I feel no communion with nature. I just feel suffocated, like I do everywhere else.
My question is, for a couple of years I have felt depressed and unmotivated. I feel unhappy like I am always missing something in my life, despite having a fulfilling marriage and a wonderful child. Do you guys think it could be because I am so far from my ocean?
Yes!!! I'm originally from the coast of NC too and I miss it so much sometimes, it's heart-wrenching. I love the mountains but the ocean is where it's at in my heart and mind. I understand completely where you're coming from, love the loggerhead turtles and they are amazing to watch and learn from. The little ones are so cute!
I was sitting in my car the other day with the windows rolled down and it was a blustery day, the wind was really kicking and I stuck my head out the window, closed my eyes and imagined I was back at the beach because it was exactly that kind of wind, a NC ocean breeze. Since becoming agnostic I have been more in tune with nature and my surroundings and I now have Pagan friends that are teaching me a few things.
If you're feeling depressed and unmotivated it probably is because you miss NC and the turtles.....hope you can visit there sometime soon, I know I plan to this year! Close your eyes on a breezy day and imagine you're there, it's very refreshing and helpful.
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