Six years ago that changed, and it changed through an encounter — though not with a person.
He met the source of energy that life itself runs on. He met it in nature, and the meeting did not leave him as it found him. What followed he describes not as a belief he adopted but as something he began to feel directly: a purity of energy moving through him, steadily, unmistakably, and not of his own making.
What he means by conversation with nature is exact, and it is worth taking literally. Not metaphor, not reverie. A forest, a river, a stand of trees at first light — these stopped being scenery and became the other side of an exchange. He found that if he grew quiet enough for long enough, something answered. Not in words. In thoughts that arrived already whole, and in images of a life he had not yet lived.
The content of that exchange was always the same, and it was never flattering. He was not being told he was special. He was being told what he was for: to protect the mother who had been feeding him his whole life without once being thanked. To carry peace further than one country. To serve people with love and with empathy — meaning the harder one, the willingness to feel what another person is feeling and not look away. And to help others arrive at the same waking he had arrived at, so that it would not end with him.
There is a reason nature is the teacher here rather than a text or an institution. A forest does not argue, flatter, or take sides. It simply continues, held together by a single intelligence that no part of it stands outside of. To sit inside that long enough is to stop being able to believe you are separate from it — and once that belief goes, the divisions human beings invent between one another go with it. They were always the same mistake, made at a different scale.
That is the whole of it. He went looking for nothing, and was met. He describes it as the moment he stopped looking at the world and was finally let inside it.