How do you define the feeling of wanting to get away, sit on a green mountain and just stare at nature? Is it depression or is it a greater, mature self awareness.?
I'll start by saying I see no reason why they should be mutually exclusive. Depression can sometimes be the most efficient mode to a greater more mature self awareness.
But either way, the connection is not as important as this: Any way it happens to be, the feeling of wanting to get away, sit on a green mountain and just stare at nature IS a confirmation of an attainment of a stage in life where you're in need of a deeper introspection of things and crave more genuine reflections and interactions with not just same old people and zombies and machines that we come in contact with every single day, but with the sublime vitality of nature herself.
It's an unequivocal sign that you're tired of the viccistides and fickleness of everyday toil and anxiety, and just want to retreat--to a place where you could be alone with yourself, with your mind, with nature, and finally achieve that ever elusive goal of making all three one and the same.
Again like I said, this might very well be depression but it is, nonetheless, if not the more genuine more mature self awarness you speak of, still a remarkably clear pathway to it.
Or maybe it's not even a case of genuine self-awareness or depression, but just a symptom of tiredness. Tiredness from noise. And you just want to be away from it all; be in a place where there is literally no noise. And what better place for this than at the top of a really green mountain. All souls, in fact, maturely self-aware of not, depressed or not, yearn for this.
Or maybe it's just a case of being tired of decadence or even just tired of monotonousness of the city, either way I would say that the feeling of wanting to get away, sit on a green mountain and just stare at nature IS a damn nice and important feeling.
I know also of a few literary geniuses who would agree with me on this. Top of that list, of course, is Henry David Thoreau. All of Thoreau's books are mainly about nature, and the importance of walking about in nature andjust exploring around nature's splendour and experiencing the soul-emancipating sensation that comes from this act. According to Thoreau, walking around for miles in the wild is not an act of craziness, it is the act of being sedantary or going to the same workplace and doing the same things over and over again that is the greatest act of craziness.
And I can't say I disagree much.
Another genius who recognized the beauty of this act was John Keats, and the romanticists as a whole. In fact the distinction between self-awareness and depression you mentioned reminds me of Ode on Melancholy. Depressed self awareness sometimes are the most important kind.
Keats understood the Importance of melancholy. So did Wordsworth and Thoreau and Emerson and co. Thoreau wasn't depressed, that I can say, but he still did it. So his might be a case of one of the well-defined, highest form of self-awareness. Keats was probably depressed, but he was still genuinely self-aware. Which goes to prove the inter-relativity of the two.
So in conclusion I'd say to me it could very well be a little bit of both. And beautifully so too!
Cheers and have a nice day.