After I got out of the ICU in mid-December, I spent two more weeks on the regular ward of the hospital, where the walls were painted green. Directly across from my bed was a spot of wall between a not-very-interesting framed print and a place where the Dri-erase board had come off and left behind scraps of tape.

I spent a lot of time staring at that piece of wall.

But I rarely saw the wall. I saw wondrous things.

I saw, for instance, a bird feeder filled with fruit in the middle of the garden of a hotel and nature center high in the Costa Rican rain forest. Behind it all was a massive, smoking volcano. Dozens of birds swooped down to the feeder. There was our own secretive scarlet tanager, one that was all black with a brilliant red rump, the blue gray tanager, the yellow-bellied bananaquit – it seemed like birds of every color of the rainbow were flitting back and forth. I was mesmerized.

Another time I was back in the brilliant winter sun of the Everglades in a canoe, blue water and the flat green mangrove swamps stretched endlessly in front of us, egrets and osprey everywhere you looked. Fish were jumping and clearing the water by several feet. The scene was so glorious I swear the fish were jumping for the sheer joy of being alive.

By no means were the things I “saw” by watching that wall all exotic.

I remember a May morning when my son was still young. I’d abetted him in playing hooky that day, and we were up on Temple Stream where it comes out of Drury Pond with our canoe and binoculars. We heard a bird begin to sing, melodious and pure. The song was so glorious and heartfelt it seemed to us the most beautiful bird song we’d ever heard, and we began to look for it. For a long time we couldn’t locate this bird, till one of us finally spotted it, high in the tree tops at the edge of a field, the sun glinting off its coppery red breast. It was “just” an American robin, and we laughed at ourselves for not having recognized it. But neither of us will ever forget that robin.

I’ve been lucky to have lived most of my life in the country, near nature. Not that I’ve always been attentive. Long stretches passed, especially in the winter when I’d leave first thing in the morning for work and come back after dark, that I’d hardly notice where I was. Times when I’d forget to breathe the clear air and never even looked up at the starry sky.

But connecting to nature is not just a personal hobby or interest. It is a deep human need. None of us can live without it and be a whole human being.

With our cell phones and Blackberries, cars to race us from place to place and 200 channels of TV, we can easily forget we are animals, with animal bodies and animal needs. We forget that food is not just something that is fat and sweet and convenient to pop in our mouths at the first moment’s twinge of hunger, and that we need to love our bodies and use them as the well-coordinated, conditioned, living machines they are meant to be.

Earth, air, fire and water: Necessities to us. So now comes the second part.

We can no longer just connect to nature and enjoy it. The earth is in peril, and it is mainly due to our extravagant carelessness as a society.

To be whole and part of nature, we must each of us take conscious and daily responsibility to reduce pollution and our demand on increasingly scarce resources. In a way, the economic crisis is a guide to the changes we need to make. Now, many of us can no longer afford to indulge our every material whim, and we have an opportunity to re-evaluate what is important and really necessary in life. Four-dollar a gallon gasoline (for the time being) has gone away, but we can still make our choices, as stewards of the earth, as if we were paying twice as much.

This is the work of the soul. I believe that each person should spend the time to make a plan about what they can do to make things better.

Perhaps you are not in a position to shut down coal-fired power plants or affect China’s plan to build as many as 20 new coal-fired plants a month. But you can change your consumption of electricity, give your friends compact fluorescent bulbs, and influence your representatives to move national policy toward renewable electrical generation. You can train your kids to turn out the lights when they leave the room, and help you set up a family recycling center.

When I am gone from this world, and when you are gone, whenever that may be, we need to know that the bananaquits in Costa Rica, the mangrove swamps in Florida, and all the robins in Temple and in every town and city across America, will go on without us.