natures invitation

Nature is sanctuary... home... life. When I am surrounded by the natural world it is easier to discard my sense of pompous separation and acknowledge my interconnection with life's many disguises.

When in nature it's ridiculous to assume a Pollyanna approach to its brilliance, waxing on about its kindness. I know that I don't understand it. I know that I must remain open and alert to the possibilities arising in each moment.
Nature demands respect and careful observation.
Nature demands that we come to our senses.
Literally.
And practice once more our neglected sense of:

smell as the scent of pine, wildflower, rain, moose, earth and wind speaks its olfactory dialog with our nose.
taste as our tongue receives the fresh tangy air of a pine forest.
hearing as we silence our cellphones and internal chatter long enough to listen and hear the rustle of wind in trees and the various sound each plant and tree and flower makes as it moves in conversation with the breeze.
touch as we feel the caress of life meeting life in and as tree, flower, bird, moose, you, me.

With senses open, nature becomes a lover inviting our bodies toward the vulnerability and pleasure of this particular NOW.

It is a miraculous invitation held out to us in every single now since the dawn of creation. And when we accept it, even for a moment, what wonders we behold.

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tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much. It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall. The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep. But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy. I am a woman who loves the spring. I nearly live for it. When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis. I gorge. This year has been hard. Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally. The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment. It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float. It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within. It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains. Eyes closed. Eyes opened. A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being. It takes courage.

the way of the sunflower

A few weeks ago, I sat holding a sunflower seed in my hand, just prior to the mouth popping, mastication phase, when it's perfect elegance floored me. I stared in awe at the tiny seed nestled in my palm and saw it, in all of it's possibility, for the first time. A flower, a million seeds, a million flowers. Each unique, each the same. And suddenly I was dumbfounded by the arrogance of human. A small seed, with no big beefy brain to catalogue, categorize, prioritize, conceptualize, quantify, qualify, justify and deify, had within it the flower it could become. Dissect the seed and there's no flower, nor any glimmer of the life that will unfold when the seed surrenders to soil, light, water. I wondered. What arrogant assuming is it, to think, with our over indulged brains and narcissistic lens of "self", that we need "do", "think", "struggle", "fight", "hustle", "cajole" and otherwise dance our way...

angelbirdflies

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