Are you forgetting that you are Nature?
I wasn’t planning on writing today. But this dropped in and asked to be written as I was getting ready to go visit a dear, wise friend who lives way, way out in the desert wilderness, where cellphone signals are non-existent. It’s clear that the few people who live out there really don’t want to be bothered.
She lives her genuinely off grid life without fanfare, on land that’s so potent and so free of human intrusion that it puts you in a beautifully altered state the moment you arrive.
Far from being monastic, she participates fully in the glorious messiness of life, love, heartbreak, joy, grief, chaos and stillness wholeheartedly and without fear.
As you can tell, I find her inspiring.
I know most of us can’t live in this way, and perhaps don’t want to. But what I wanted to distill from being an admiring witness to the authentic yes-to-life mettle of this human is that she lives committed to the truth that she’s a part of Nature, in a way that’s just…natural.
How else could it be?
Our dog Bodhi, in one of his many painstakingly dug holes on the land we live on
Aren’t we all part of Nature - whatever the circumstances of our lives may be?
And isn’t it in the enforced forgetting of this truth that that we exploit our own energy, and the planet’s resources?
In your busy schedule, how can you creatively weave in this remembering that you are also Nature.
Will you let yourself rest when you’re tired, free from screens + scrolling?
Will you put the never-ending mental to-do list aside for a moment, and trust in an intelligence that you can objectively experience when you observe anything in Nature, and that you are also inseparable from?
What are you afraid will happen if you do?
Could you be with the part of yourself that's afraid? Give it space + oxygen without trying to “fix” it or shut it up?
Stay a while with your Self, and let your doing flow from there.
In the timeless words of Lao Tzu, “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
You too are inseparable from Nature.
And bring the part of you that's afraid to The Light Gets In, the weekly online nervous system regulation + meditation sitting, this Sunday at 10am PST.