Observing Nature
Beirdd

Wed Mar 10 21:50:31 1999
Here are just some thoughts on a subject that I should probably take more time to examine.*p*--Beirdd*p*Observing Nature*p*It is very fashionable nowadays to talk about one’s “nature experiences,” to nod sagely when hearing about the beauty and importance of the great outdoors, or to shed an invisible tear and bite the lower lip when litter crosses one’s path.  We like to talk about being close to this plant spirit and that animal spirit, and do our utmost to demean our own spirit as the heir of an environmentally unconscious humanity. “This is my tree-friend,” we say, and hug it.  “I suffer with the land,” we moan, and prance upon it. Yet to observe nature, to really see it with an attention that goes past the boundaries of our own needs for self-affirmation, -condemnation, or -adoration, is to find the definition of this world in an otherworldly tongue.*p*When crushed by the confines of everyday living, it is common to want to go out into the open, into the great outdoors, and open up our windows to the power and freedom there.  Contrary to what we normally like to believe, nature does not open itself to us so easily; the “outdoors” are not waiting to rush in to the chaos of our shady human hearts, let alone our eyes, ears and other senses.  Heraclitus once said, “Nature loves to hide.”  Just take a moment to recall the experience of nature you had today on the way home from work. You saw it.  You even let your eye linger.  But did it really see what was there?  Trees, clouds, the stubborn grasses growing through the asphalt of the shoulder. But these are only the cosmetics of the cosmos that is nature.  Only the eye and spirit, trained in an attentiveness that permits a metaphysical clarity, can penetrate the make-up to find that of which everything is made.  Such a training needs to begin within the seer, whose expectations, assumptions, and limited egocentric view, must be shed like the months-old ice at the touch of the spring sun.*p*It is futile to seek nature, to become immersed in it, when we are wearing such an outfit, like a spiritual scuba suit, like a latex second skin that lets nothing out and  nothing in.  Rather, we should allow ourselves to be peeled from this pseudo-shield, to be born again into the nature of which we are a part, and an important one at that. In silence we come to our natal day, without even a breath, and still as a stone in a stream. Yet, to the stream, the stone is  elastic.  In our silent, still moments of  attentiveness, we become as nascent as nature, open to and defining the meaning of life, constantly born and reborn, spinning in the sacred dance we would otherwise watch blindly from the moving walls of our own obsession.