Connecting with Nature… Connecting with Each Other

Reflections after a recent hike at Land’s End

By Point Lobos: Ethan, Karthik, Michael, Shin and me.

I’ve never been much of an outdoors kind of person. I used to associate the outdoors with hard physical labor. Growing up, I would have to help my dad with his gardening and lawn service business and I hated it. I would get all dirty, tired and I hated the smell of freshly cut grass. He had one client in particular who had a 5-acre property and we’d work there all day on Saturdays. We would start at 6am in the morning and work until around 4 or 4:30pm. I would tell him I had a lot of homework and studying to do just so that I wouldn’t have to help then I could stay home. My perspective has definitely changed significantly since returning from my ayahuasca retreat in Peru. I have felt a much deeper desire to connect with the outdoors and nature more frequently. I feel very fortunate to live in the San Francisco Bay Area where we have access so many beautiful natural parks. Some friends and I recently hiked the Land’s End Trail in the Sutro District of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. After finishing the hike I felt a greater sense of well-being, more at peace and so thankful to connect more intimately with my friends and with nature. 

Eagle's Point, at the beginning of the trail. 

By the Mile Rock Overlook. 

"We need the tonic of wildness... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature." — Henry David Thoreau