Horace, everyone’s favorite Roman lyric poet, once wrote that you could “expel nature with a pitchfork, but she will always return.”

If there’s one thing we know about nature, it’s that it is relentless. Just take a look outdoors, literally, just look outside your window, maybe open your door a crack; it’s there. You may not recognize it because, when you think of nature, your imagination runs to vast fields of poppies or the Yosemite Valley. But, it’s there, growing in the cracks of the sidewalk, scurrying up a tree, blowing over the beaches.

On this, the 50th celebration of Earth Day, we asked videographers Thomas Cordova, Cheantay Jensen, Asia Morris and Steven Smith to capture slices of nature without venturing far from their Long Beach neighborhoods. Some of them never left home, some went a few blocks. What they found was beautiful and available, if you only take the time to engage it.

As Henry David Thoreau, everyone’s favorite Transcendental poet, wrote, “Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.”

Perhaps a silver lining from these admittedly dark times is that many of us now have the time to appreciate what we usually dismiss as a backdrop to the constant scurry of our lives; the idea you have to go somewhere to find nature is misguided. It’s there.