Seeking Nature Where We Find It

  

As I find my life getting busier and busier, I never fail to notice that a need for nature creeps into the peripheries of my mind. It's one of those things that I miss without even being aware of it, until the deprivation grows to the point of longing. Since my schedule has kept me away from "nature" in the wild sense, I've gone to find it outside my back door.

It's amazing what one can observe, study, and find remarkable if we only take the time to stop and really see. The industry of the bees as they test out each and every tiny flower on a stalk for nectar. The intense aggression of battling hummingbirds fighting their arial battles in the sky over the crocosmia. The constant, blind, wriggling of the worms in the compost as they go about their business of turning my leftover garbage into wonderful compost. Even the play of the light shifting as the afternoon progresses can be a source of pleasure and wonder.

Do you ever find that when something is on your mind, that strange little coincidences occur? While I was pondering the thoughts above, I found the quote below in a book I happened to pick up, and it spoke to me. I haven't read Lorraine Anderson's book, but I think I'll have to now.

"Nature offers us a thousand simple pleasures--plays of light and color, fragrances in the air, the sun's warmth on skin and muscle, the audible rhythm of life's stir and push--for the price of merely paying attention. What joy! But how unwilling or unable many of us are to pay this price in an age when manufactured sources of stimulation and pleaure are everywhere at hand. For me, enjoying nature's pleasures takes a conscious choice, a choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up."

--Lorraine Anderson,
Sister Of The Earth