Nature...

You never really understand or truly ever appreciate the word. For some it’s an unfamiliar and foreign ideology. As a 16 year old girl coming from war torn Afghanistan, nature is neither a strong source of pride or contentment in my country. Food, water, and shelter on the other hand makes the cut. However, where does the food or clean drinking water come from at the end of the day? Well, it certainly doesn’t rain from the sky nor grow out of the palm of our hands. It comes from the one source that we reply on the most - nature - no matter how wealthy or oblivious we may be to it. “Nature is the art of God”, and the art of God it definitely is.

We first moved to Canada as Immigrants without a place to live in an enormous first world country. My first memorable experience with nature was sometime in late November many years ago. I remember vividly waking up that morning and going over to pull away our faded old curtains aside for some early morning sunlight. The second I did, a white light blinded me. I ran from the window screaming and trying to wake up my mother who was still peacefully asleep in one of the rooms down the corner. I ran under our apartments age worn bed and shakingly cried about the thought of death and the world ending... As for the white light? Snow...

Months later, my sixth grade teacher drew an image of white bear on the school whiteboard. She told us that “Today we were going to learn about polar bears!” Minutes later I learned that polar bears were going extinct. As for the glaciers? They were melting. Well… there went my plans of going to the Arctic one day. She then made us watch a children's documentary, and the next thing I knew, we were looking at giant mountains of ice crashing down into the ocean below. “Glaciers”, she told us, “They’re melting.” I was then introduced to the idea of climate change.

The next few months, I spent time reading numerous books and watching multiple shows on television on glaciers in a white world known as the “Arctic Circle”. I decided that I was going do something about the polar bears I had only recently figured out about. As for nature? It had other plans.

In 2013, my family was living in Calgary at the time when a catastrophe hit out city - the ‘Alberta Floods’. I was watching the news that morning when a call came from school telling us that our school day was canceled due to a flood that occurred near downtown Calgary. Unlike the polar bears, I was terrified because this disaster was so close to home.
I learned that day, that even the most safest and secure cities cannot withstand the strongest of natural disasters. As Abby Adams once said "Nature is what wins in the end." It won that day and I realized that it would win every other day to come as well.

However, we as a community we're not going to let a flood devastate the hundreds of families in our city. Neither would we let the ‘Fort Mcmurray Fires’ that occurred 3 years later, tear apart our hearts here in Calgary...

So what has nature taught me? An oblivious eye is not the best solution. Just like here in my city, I learned that we have to embrace nature in even the worst of times. No, we cannot win in the end, as proven multiple times in history. The best choice, however, is to learn how to preserve our Earth. We can do so by joining environmental and climate change clubs all over the world or even just reading about it and becoming more aware of what we’re doing in our own backyards. For the future, we just have to give a little more care, thought and awareness to the world surrounding us. We can never stop learning from nature, nor can we ever rid ourselves from it. Therefore, it would be best to “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.”