Do you think about yourself in relation to nature around you? What is your relationship with nature?
Are you intertwined like ancient roots or curved branches? Do you blend in? Are you detached?
I have just realized that the more I am in nature, the more I details I notice and the more supported I feel.
Yes. I was going to say ‘healed’ and there is that too. But it’s supported that I mean. And feeling supported, as my extraordinary homoeopath once told me, is the number one most important factor in anyone’s healing.
Last night I noticed that the bees were still busy caring for the pinky-purple flowers of the giant rhododendron trees in our back garden as dusk was darkening thickly around them and the wind was gusty and hard. Yet even with their aerodynamically-absurd tiny wings and big, fluffy bodies the bees kept going.
Suddenly I’m thinking the quickening dark is an analogy for depression and that bees are a wild inspiration to us for mindful activity in the face of impending mental angst.
I am seeing these kind of tiny, potent metaphors and analogies everywhere I look in nature now.
It’s quite overwhelming.
It’s like I knew all this but now I am being shown, blinkers off, eyes wide open.
I’m frightened yet thrilled. Like when a child asks for some “danger†within the safety of a familiar, loved story.
A single happy moment. Unbidden. Arriving during a simple, productive task.
Cherished.
I feel we have lost much of the support of nature, the bracing perspective it gives us, and the multifarious, analogous aids we have in seasons, plants, birds, animals – aids we can easily find in every living thing if we simply look.
I think we humans have simply taken it all for granted, simply not really noticed it and furthermore we’ve been hugely attracted, like bees to blue plastic flowers, to gadgets and gizmos and fripperies that provide saccharine nectar for us which doesn’t sustain and nurture us but gives us hedonistic, too-quick highs and cravings for more.
Don’t get me wrong, I am as easily seduced by shiny as you or anyone else. But now I am feeling a different seduction that’s much more rewarding. A primal craving. And a deeper level of satisfaction.
I’m Noticing Nature.
Feeling supported by it.
Which in turn makes me Notice Nature more.
And feel ever more supported.
Why should this be such a surprise to me when it’s in my nature? Is it in your nature too?
Image “Forget Not” above borrowed from Mae Chevrette Art – Original Paintings and Mixed Media. You can buy this and other art such as “In the Sea” and “The Love You Make” oh, and “To Be Brave” from Mae’s Etsy store. Thank you for making the world more beautiful Mae.