How can I spend more time in nature when I live in a busy city?

Nasreddin Hodja understood something we often forget: the joke isn't that you need wilderness to find what nature offers. It's that you're already surrounded by it, just waiting for attention. A city park isn't inferior to a forest—it's just asking you to look differently. Start small. Twenty minutes on a bench watching birds, a single tree you visit weekly, soil under your fingernails from a window box. The Hodja would laugh at our all-or-nothing thinking: either we're hiking remote mountains or we're hopelessly urban. Neither is true. Nature isn't a destination you schedule quarterly. It's a practice of noticing—the crack where grass breaks through concrete, how light changes on the same wall, which insects visit which flowers. Your city has microhabitats everywhere. Find one. Visit it regularly. Let it become yours, not as escape, but as return. The paradox is this: you don't need to leave the city to find nature. You need to stop pretending it isn't already here.