Two Frogs Reminded Me What Loving Nature Actually Feels Like
They were loud, busy with each other, and completely indifferent to me, and watching them I remembered that kinship with the living world happens at this scale or not at all.
Loving the Earth has become heavy work.
If you care about the living world these days, most of what arrives under that care is grief. The news carries losses too large to hold, the forecasts run in one direction, and the love itself starts to feel like standing watch at something vast and slipping. Many of the people I walk with and write for carry this quietly. They love nature so much, and from such a distance, that they have almost stopped feeling it. Francis Weller, in his classic text about grief, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, writes that grief and love are two ends of the same current, and that sorrow left untended will eventually dam the whole stream. The relationship becomes a relationship with an idea, and the idea is mostly sorrow, and sorrow at a planetary scale eventually goes numb, because no heart was built to hold a planet.
I carry it too. Which is why I want to tell you about two loud frogs in a pond outside Espalion.
A Morning I Nearly Walked Past
I had left the town about thirty minutes before, on a morning of light rain, the invigorating kind that wakes the smells of the path.
The trail along that stretch had been recently renovated, one of those local nature paths that are appearing more and more across rural France, built so the people who live there can walk out among their own fields and ponds. I saw the pond off the path. I noted it the way a walker notes things, and I would have kept going. I had many kilometers ahead and a rhythm to keep, and a pond is a pond.
Then the frogs started up, and they were not asking politely.
The calling was loud enough to stop me mid-stride, an urgent, ratcheting racket rising off the water, and I gently stepped off the path to find it. Two frogs, close together in the shallows, one seemingly on top of the other, calling with their whole bodies. A mating, I think, or the urgent business leading to one. I stood in the light rain at the edge of a small French pond and watched two frogs wholly consumed by the oldest work there is, entirely indifferent to the man with the pack standing a few meters away.
I stayed for a few minutes. I recorded the short video above because it seemed like something worth capturing, given how freely they were sharing. As I continued walking, a word came to mind that I hadn’t anticipated.
I felt honored.
Honored by Frogs
It is a strange word for it, and it is the accurate one.
Honored the way you feel when you witness something real that was not performed for you and did not require you. The frogs were not scenery arranged along my route. They were two particular beings in the middle of their own urgent morning, and the pond was theirs, and the rain was theirs, and I happened to be allowed at its edge. Nothing about the moment was large. It was two small lives in a puddle of a pond on a local trail, and it moved me more than any vista of that entire day’s walk.
Here is what I noticed in myself afterward, and this is the part I most want to share. Standing at that pond, I felt none of the heaviness. No grief, no helplessness, no watch-keeping over something vast and slipping. What I felt was delight, and interest, and that odd gratitude, the whole live current of feeling that my love of nature was supposed to contain and so rarely does anymore.
The frogs gave me back the feeling, and they did it by being small.
The Size of Things We Can Actually Love
You cannot hold a relationship with a planet.
You can grieve one, worry over one, sign petitions for one, and all of that matters. However, none of it feels like love because love is a relationship, and relationships occur between particular beings at particular times.
Two frogs can be met. A planet can only be mourned. When our care for the living world is conducted entirely at the scale of the whole Earth, it is conducted at the one scale where encounter is impossible, and a love with no encounters in it will eventually go numb, no matter how sincere it is.
The frogs were not a small version of loving the Earth. They were the actual thing. The love of the living world, when it is alive, is made of exactly such meetings, one pond, one morning, two loud particular beings, and a person willing to leave the path. The vast grief is real and has its place. It cannot be the whole diet. Kinship needs bodies, and bodies come one and two at a time.
I would have walked past. That is the detail I keep returning to. The pond was visible, and I saw it, and it took two frogs calling at full volume to actually stop me. The living world had to interrupt me to be met, and I am someone who walks hundreds of kilometers a year for precisely this. If it takes that much to stop me, I understand what it takes to stop anyone.
Your Pond Is Closer Than You Think
The frogs are not only in France.
Within a short walk of where you live, particular beings are going about their urgent business right now, in the strip of wet ground behind the parking lot, the pond in the local park, the hedge the sparrows argue in. The renovated trail I walked was built for exactly this, for local people to meet their own fields and water. Your equivalent exists. The question is only whether you are stoppable, whether one small loud life is allowed to interrupt your route and your rhythm and pull you three meters off the path.
If your love of the living world has gone heavy and abstract, I am not going to tell you to care less about the whole. I am telling you, the whole is not where the feeling lives. Go be honored by something small this week. Let it be busy and indifferent to you, and let it not need you at all, and see what comes back.
The grief is real. So are the frogs.
Where has a small life stopped you lately, and did you let it? I would be glad to hear about it in the comments.
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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is available to you wherever you are walking this week.
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