I grew up in an apartment in the city. Through my formative years, my environment was made mostly of cement, yardless buildings, narrow alleyways, laundromats, buses, storefronts, and house cats.

We did live a few blocks from Golden Gate Park, but it’s not the kind of park where you can go so deep in that you forget you live in a major urban area.

There were a few weeks at summer camp here and there, weekends with friends out of town, and church retreats. My comfort level in nature ranged from “uneasy” to “terrified.” Insects typically seen as harmless or even appreciated as beautiful inspired the kind of irrational full-bore panic that might, if I were a kid these days, lead my mother to seek medication for me.

I’m talking about ladybugs, butterflies, and beetles. Don’t get me started on moths, spiders, and bees.

I remember one night at camp, I was lying on a cot under the stars in the Santa Cruz mountains. I suppose those stars were wondrous. I really can’t tell you, because I spent the whole night fighting tears as I imagined that I could feel an enormous insect inside my sleeping bag.

Other than drives and walks on the insect-free coastline, I managed to largely avoid nature for much of my adulthood.

When we moved to Salt Lake City, my irrational fears had a chance to resurface. That first summer, it seemed like every night the news there was a story about people getting struck by lightning, sucked into rivers and drowning, falling to their deaths off hiking trails, lost in the mountains with no food or water, or otherwise losing the man vs. nature battle.

This place, I thought, is dangerous! I didn’t want to go outside. A trip to the grocery store in a thunderstorm seemed like asking to be struck down. I mean there you are, standing in a wide-open parking lot, very much like a lightning rod.

I missed my comfortable city dangers: deserted BART stations late at night, a gang of kids on a corner, tension among strangers on a crowded bus.

It’s taken nearly the whole eleven years, so far, of living in this place of incredible natural beauty to change me.

From our home near downtown, I can see the mountains. Recently I’ve started to notice them in ways I hadn’t before. Had the morning light always hit the eastern range like that, showing the depth and drama of the shadowy crags? I find myself wanting to know the names of all of the birds that visit our yard and feeder. My husband and I will call each other to the porch to make sure we don’t miss the moon, or a dazzling sunrise.

One day early this spring, it struck me profoundly: There is nothing ugly in the natural world. Even “ugly” animals like those deep-sea fish with horror-movie teeth, or that poor “ugliest dog in the world” whose picture has been circulated around the Internet, are spectacular and thrilling in their way.

There are buildings that are beautiful, highways that are impressive, cars that make me happy to look at.

But as creators, man just can’t compete with God.

This may seem an obvious point, and something I should have discovered long before age forty. For this city girl, though, this love of nature and appreciation of it, and communion with it, is new. And I think there are a lot of people like me, who have been disconnected from nature for most of their lives, and who have even been suspicious of it and afraid.

In his book Clowning in Rome, Henri Nouwen writes about John Henry Newman’s thoughts on the natural world being a “veil through which an invisible world is intimated”:

“How differently we would live if we were constantly aware of this veil and sensed in our whole being how nature is ever ready for us to hear and see the great story of the Creator’s love, to which it points.”

This newfound comfort in and attraction I have to the natural world does feel like a kind of healing. What I feel now when I’m surrounded by the created world is overwhelmed not by the fear of a tarantula attack or ladybug swarm, but overwhelmed by awe, wonder, joy. I feel simultaneously loved and insignificant. Not insignificant in the way of being lost in a crowd of people. Insignificant in that my worries about my career or the impression I’ve made on someone or if I’ll get any good email today are reduced to their proper size, which is tiny.

One of my favorite hymns lately is “This Is My Father’s World.” It starts with these lines:

This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.
This is my Father’s world: I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
His hand the wonders wrought.

On a hike this morning, the wonders included a green mountain valley and the peaks beyond, a hillside blanketed with yellow flowers, Western bluebirds calling to one another under the dramatic gray sweep of the near-rain sky.

As we crested a hill, I told my husband, “This would be a good place to be struck by lightning. We’re the tallest things out here.”

Now I can say these things with a laugh at myself. It’s not my world to control. The hand that wrought these wonders can surely look after my life, while I enjoy the rain on my face, and the birds go on singing.