As much as I had wanted to believe that the night was over, it was far from it. I stepped outside, and breathed in wholeheartedly as I let the humid spring air lick my face. In sequence, I lethargically strolled into my sacred backyard and lied down amidst the slightly dampened surface. Each strain of lime green grass tickled not only the outermost layer of my skin, but brushed against even the most submerged spirits that inhibit the murky chamber that was my subconscious. Despite my abysmal sentiments, I had never once felt so endeared in my life.

I looked up at the midnight sky as my mind plunged into a state of perpetual introspection. My mother’s words hauntingly spread inside of me and induced goose bumps: Matthew…you’ve never had a real father…you were created with the aid of a donor. One of my earliest life dreams, which entailed meeting father, had been shattered before my feet. That icon, which I had constantly hoped to emulate the more I grew up, had spontaneously morphed into a figment of my imagination. The more I contemplated, the more my cranium throbbed; it was as though my brain had involuntarily inherited this function from my temporarily relinquished heart. The throbbing intensified when I recalled my cumulative hours of sleep for the previous four days of the week. I had arrived home from my arduous baseball practice three hours ago, and yet the sweat still spewed from my body as if I had just struggled through a desert marathon. And, to top it all off, I had not even touched my colossal stack of homework to complete before the night’s end.











However, almost immediately one of the most peculiar happenings of my life transpired. I felt as though something had smashed into me. In no more than a split second, my infernal sentiments had completely vanished. I glanced to my left, and subsequently to my right, and then back up at the glistening stars; I had come to realize that regardless of all the quagmires of which I would have to encounter in the future, that I would always have the aesthetic of my own backyard to capitulate to. I realized that nature has instilled within my soul a new sense of solace, of which I was previously unfamiliar with. No matter where my real father is on this planet, I always have three nurturing mothers all of whom would look after me; my birth mother, my female guardian, and Nature.









As Jane Austen so pointedly put it, “To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.” The majority of society tends to habitually overlook the importance of simplicity. We are entrenched in a universe that is dependent on technology, a universe that derives excessive pleasure from it. Yet, we cannot seem to grasp an ounce of the heinousness that technology omits. Although enhanced destruction via enhancing weaponry and an epidemic of suicides induced by internet predators are appropriate examples of the treachery which technology causes, its most nefarious crime is that it pilfers us of our sincerity. We are all becoming less familiar with our sentiments, because when we are engulfed in technology, we often lose sight of what triggers our emotions. We tend to become ambivalent to absolutely all that surrounds us, and overall detached from the real world; that luminous screen in our palms which sports paragraphs of text, suddenly becomes more enthralling that the paragraphs of text which come out of the mouths of the people we actually encounter. If we are to continue bolstering the abundance of technology in our everyday lives, then we must not lose sight of what influences individuality among our people. We must all have something which keeps us in touch with the most authentic part of ourselves. For me, this "something" is nature.