I have difficulty interpreting the nature of my own life, a thing I feel intimately and continuously, so it’s not surprising that we can’t all agree on the nature of herons.

What, then, is a blue heron?

They live about 15 years. They stand around four feet tall. They walk the shoreline, delivering an overt message to me about quiet contemplation and self-determination.

The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you choose to give it meaning. It will be that meaning until you decide it means something else. That’s how meaning works. It’s a subjective act of interpretation.

You might get the impression that I’m saying herons are meaningless, but that’s not what I’m saying at all. When I see a heron and interpret its behavior as a reminder for me to slow down and think about what actually matters in my life, that is what that heron means. Meaning, like many crafts, happens in collaboration between maker and materials.

There’s nothing nihilistic about this.

A human alone in the wilderness has neither fur nor fangs but does have the ability to build shelter. Our nature understands that we must build what we need. Community. Tools. Shelter. Meaning.

The heron allows me to build the meaning I need for the moment I need it. Making meaning in this way is like creating harmony with two voices. I sing my portion. The heron sings hers. The harmony is woven and meaning exists in the world.

The trouble starts when we forget about our participation in the creation of harmony, of meaning. When we remove our agency in meaning-making, we start to think in absolutes. We are our jobs. We are defined by the car we drive. Our objective worth is reflected in the way our parents or our peers treat us. We don’t lend our voices to harmony. We buy our harmonies pre-sung in tidy plastic packages.

I believe our worth is fixed. We are innately worthy. Our meaning? Our identity? Those concepts require our intentional participation and they are mercifully flexible.

The heron only represents self-determination when I need her to. That doesn’t diminish the heron’s power. It simply highlights my own.

There are objective facts in the world. Of course there are. But our concept of self, our significance, our sense of whether or not we deserve to take up space in the universe or experience joy and contentment—these are not questions of fact, they are questions of meaning.

The heron sings her portion of the harmony. We sing ours.

Together, we make something new.

Something we dearly need.

After graduate school, armed with a master’s in literature, a loving partner, immense debt, brutal and unacknowledged mental illness, and no plan beyond escaping academia, I entered a grim half dozen years during which I don’t recall ever seeing a heron.

The truth is, I must have seen them. They are dinosaurs when in flight and fairytale creatures when walking the river. Hard to miss. But, somehow, I never noted their presence.

During those years, I was not concerned with herons.

I entered a period in which the world had stopped being a source of wonder. The world was something to fend off. Nature was a ghost in the attic, a memory of childhood. It wouldn’t pay my bills or quiet my persistent urge to end my life. A heron was a half-remembered song from a dead age, a soiled stuffed animal wedged in a storm drain. In those grim years, a wading bird didn’t merit interpretation.

Eventually, I found my footing in marketing and nonprofit work. A series of increasingly solid jobs that saw me become better paid and increasingly hopeless. More respectable and less in touch with my own mind and body. I worked as a coordinator. Then a manager. Eventually holding the title of director of external relations for Ohio University’s Zanesville campus.

I was doing the things I was supposed to do.

I was climbing the ladder.

After my master’s, I’d been accepted to a Ph.D. program, but by that time I had a clearer picture of what a life spent living on $1,200/month stipends for another four years (and for an unspecified number of years after that as I moved around the country fighting for increasingly elusive teaching positions and living on adjunct wages below the poverty line in a time of shrinking budgets and closing campuses) would look like. So, I turned down the Ph.D. and gambled that wherever I worked could hardly be more exploitative than academia.

In a relatively short number of years, I was back in a university context, but on the administration side. I had a nice office. I was paid on par with tenure-track professors. I was told I would even have the opportunity to teach if I liked, all without enduring years of starvation-wage adjunct positions in the common, current fashion of building a career on the teaching side of academia.

In many ways, I felt like I had outsmarted the system.

By the time I held the director title at Ohio University, I had an impressive resume and unchecked chronic depression that led me to contemplate suicide several times an hour.

In the end, desperate and shattered, but with the unyielding support of my wife, Leslie, I made the terrifying decision to leave work and try to rebuild my mental health. The herons had gone from my life, and I didn’t even know to miss them.

I had no plan.

I had no hope.

I carried immense shame about being a burden to my partner.

I knew, intellectually, that I was profoundly fortunate to have the space and support to prioritize my health and recovery. I had a rare privilege. I knew it, but I didn’t feel it. I felt hollow and miserable, more so as I understood that ending my career didn’t end my pain. I felt as if I had escaped from a burning building only to find that the entire world was burning. There was no real escape to be found in life.

I just wanted to die.

Then, two months after leaving the job I had expected to be my career for the next 30 years, I took my first intentional walk through the woods. Nature may have felt like a relic of my distant past, but it was a relic I could visit in the waking world, a memory with a parking lot.

It was January, a Wednesday morning. Ohio was wearing its traditional gray on gray on gray. Gray skies. Gray roads speckled with salt residue. Ranks of gray trees, bare and silent.

Chronic major depression had been slowly killing me for years. I had disassociated away vast swaths of memory. I was adrift without a career or a goal or a purpose, but a landmark from childhood loomed large within my skull and I made for it. The woods. The quiet beneath the trees. The pure, intoxicating pull of small rivers and flat stones that dare you to look beneath.

So, I went to the trees and the water. I drove a little way south to a park called Shale Hollow. It isn’t a big place. A patch of protected wilderness not far from a busy highway crowded with shopping centers. A shallow creek winds through the park and a few tall shale formations show off perfectly round concretions, spherical carbonate rocks bigger than beachballs exposed between the finely stacked layers of stone.

I remember climbing out of my warm car and smelling the citrus tang of leaf rot and muddy water. It was like seeing an old friend across a restaurant, feeling a draw to speak with them and a pang of fear that reconnecting after so many years was impossible.

What did I have to say to the wilderness? What did we still have in common?

Somewhere distant, I heard children laughing beneath the trees.

A crow cawed and was answered.

I shut my car door and walked for the nearest path.

I crossed a footbridge, dark planks marbled with green and grime, and entered the woods beneath the skeletal branches of winter-bare trees. To my right, a leaf-strewn path of hardpacked earth disappeared up a rocky slope. I followed it.

I felt odd.

Alone in the woods, I was different.

I wasn’t an employee.

I wasn’t a spouse or a son or a student.

I wasn’t friend or teacher.

I wasn’t patient or client.

I was just there.

I had no cultural or social role to perform.

Just me.

An animal.

A collection of senses.

No one was asking what I did for a living or waiting for me to make a witty observation.

No one was giving me a sales pitch or expecting one from me.

It was disorienting, both in terms of what was there and what was not.

I took careful steps, pressing my face close to trees, studying the otherworldly maps of lichens on the bark, strange continents in yellow, green, and brown. I wondered about the names of this cluster of pines or that patch of dry moss. I used to know these things. It was like walking into my old elementary school and feeling that vertiginous sense of everything being the same, yet utterly different. It was a bit nostalgia and a bit déjà vu.

“That tree with strips of bark hanging like sheepdog’s fur. I knew its name once.”

“That woodpecker, small and quick, dappled black and white. I knew its name once.”

I walked, wondering about things I had forgotten, feeling my emotional pain hot on my neck like a second sun.

My depression often manifests as self-criticism, as “should” thoughts. I should be eating better. I should be contributing more to my family. I should be doing more to help, to earn, to create. Yet there, in those woods, there were no vital tasks I was meant to perform. No fleeting chance at prestige or material gain. I drove there for the express purpose of being there, and it was hard to argue that I was failing at that simple goal.

I was conscious of my overwhelming ignorance about what I was seeing, but it’s not as if the trees are insulted when you don’t know their scientific names. There was no test waiting for me in the parking lot. My vague internal fear that I was “doing the woods incorrectly” couldn’t provide any supporting evidence.

My path brought me alongside a broad, shallow stream, its banks piled with fractal shards of dark shale that shone wetly in the morning light. I looked upstream, then downstream. There was no one. The distant sounds of traffic murmured somewhere beyond the trees, a conversation in the next room.

My shoes crunched on the flaking stone that covered the banks like spilled puzzle pieces. The wind stung my face. The water smelled like soil and decay. Every bird call was a voice I had once known, a reminder of a forgotten time.

Then I saw the heron.

A great blue heron standing still as a statue on the edge of a pool. She saw me. She wasn’t fishing, just standing like a picture in a book, her yellow eye fixed on my face. I matched her stillness. She looked too big, too unlikely, too strange to be standing out in the open for anyone to see.

Yet, she was there.

And I remembered.

I knew this bird.

I knew her name. I knew the way she folded her neck as she flew, the way that beak shot toward the water like an arrow from a bow. I knew this bird and, in that moment, I knew something else.

It’s all still here, I thought.

The heron. The creek. The trees.

It’s not dead and gone.

It’s not locked away in the past.

It’s not a phantom of childhood or a metaphor for a bygone age.

It’s still here.

A hundred thousand little rivers. A million secret sights beneath fallen logs and riverbank rocks. It was all still here.

I had gone away, not nature.

But, of course, that’s not quite right either.

I hadn’t gone anywhere.

I had just stopped noticing.

There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.

Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.

I stood there, watching the heron, watching as she decided I was not a threat, as she turned and paced upstream, a poem of ancient slowness. I stood and I silently cried, with the wind numbing my ears and my tears shining in the sunlight.

I was a grown man, alone in the woods, crying at a heron’s back, and even if I couldn’t articulate it at the time, it was the most hopeful I’d felt in years.

There was the bird, but not just a bird.

The encounter was a bridge to when nature was family.

It was my storybook wizards.

It was science as magic, nature as art.

It was priceless and essential, yet it had no use for my money or imagined prestige.

I could feel that the heron was alive in the same way I was alive.

I couldn’t deny that the world that made the heron made me too, that we were of the same time and context, and somehow, in that moment, it didn’t feel possible that I was made to be miserable and afraid, to be measured by bank statements or resumes, not when there were living poems, descended from dinosaurs, walking beneath the silent trees just as they had long before the first written language.

The heron told me that my better days were not beyond reach and that the world was more than pain, bitter news, and sleepless nights.

There are wonders here.

Things worth experiencing, worth knowing.

Magic hidden in plain sight.

Bats can hear shapes. Plants can eat light. Bees can dance maps. We can hold all these ideas at once and feel both heavy and weightless with the absurd beauty of it all. These are some facts that are easy to overlook.

These are facts that saved my life.

It would be reductive and dishonest to say that my road to mental health was as simple as inviting nature back into my life. It wasn’t. Yet, reconnecting with the natural world was a key step along the way. Often, to heal, we need a reason to seek healing. Depression tells us there are no such reasons, that healing is hard and not worth the effort. Nature told me something different.