Nature Always Tells A Different Story
Nature always tells its story of love and community in a very unique, real, original, and healing manner. You can almost not get it wrong with nature.
I love nature and green spaces, especially now that most cities are becoming chaotic and gradually losing touch with life. If you ask me what my wish is for a place to live or build a house, I will probably tell you on a hilltop overlooking green landscape, with access to sunrise and sunset. Or to build a forest house, or a house close to a lake. You know what I mean. It just makes sense to me to wake up in the morning to the sweet sound of chirping birds or chattering monkeys doing their usual cheeky acts, or wake up to the sound of the ocean tide hitting the shores. And this is not me being a luxury freak. The house can just be a small thatched roof house made of natural earth materials, but within nature.
Anyway, here is the story of the day.
One afternoon, I was having a meal, and suddenly there was this lovely fragrant smell of wild basil pouring through the living room. Where we currently live has lots of windows and plenty of natural light and cross ventilation. So, the fragrance just filled the entire house like someone soaked in perfume walked in. I asked my wife if she perceived that minty sweet smell of basil. She answered in the affirmative. So, I went to one of the windows to try and find out where the smell was coming from.
Just outside our fence was this herd of cows, goats, and sheep grazing among the large bushes of wild basil scattered everywhere. It was an open landscape with grass and a small stream, so the animals came there often to graze and also to drink. It was so amazing to see how these animals grazing within the bushes were creating such a beautiful smell of wild basil in our living room.
But this is the thing about nature, a giver of good things in such a symbiotic way. The animals feed the plants with their manure, while the plants feed the animals with fresh leaves, and then we get to enjoy the sweet fragrance of their party in our living room. It’s priceless.
Outside of the artistic picture that the whole basil fragrance painted, I mean, it’s like a skilled perfumer was working her craft just outside of the door, you also get to see how nature is united as one big ecosystem of loveliness, sharing and caring. The wild basil will not tell the cows “I’m not giving you my leaves today because you pooped on me yesterday”, nor will the wind refuse to bring the sweet basil fragrance our way because we don’t eat the grass. Every one of them just does what every one of them does as assigned by their Maker. And in this beautiful ecosystem, none of the entities involved will ever try to outdo each other or be jealous when one seems to be doing better. Better in this sense is quite relative. Their uniqueness is their power, and their collective power is enlarged by how much they are willing to work together, not as competitors but as partners in the same purpose of keeping Earth worth living on.
When nature comes knocking
I love how nature interacts with itself and with every other thing around. And mind you, we humans are also nature and part of nature. So, when I speak of nature, I am not exempting humans from the story. We are all part of the grand ecosystem called CREATION.
Here is another beautiful nature story that is currently happening in this same house that we are in. There’ve been this set of beautiful tiny tiny-looking birds that come to our bedroom window to wake us up every morning. This is not a fairy tale. These birds, or sometimes just one, will show up at the window and start to peck on the glass. And they come around the same time in the morning every day. They come between 6:30 am and 7 am. Same time frame. I am not sure if they come there to see a reflection of themselves in the window, but it warms the heart that such lovely birds come every morning to wake us up. It just feels like someone who doesn’t look like me cares to say hello in the morning. That, too, is priceless.
We all have fragrances
And this is absolutely true. We all have fragrance, and our fragrances are unique to us. But sometimes it takes us allowing someone else to brush through our lives to trigger that fragrance within us. Just like until those animals walked through the bushes of wild basil, breaking some branches, I will assume, the fragrance did not burst open. It’s like the adage that says, “the only way to get oil from an olive is to crush the olive.”
And yes, I am aware that there are those who come into our lives to cause damage, beat us down, step on us, poop on us and then walk away like kings of a mindless jungle. This is real. But there are also those who come to cause gentle hurts by brushing themselves against our egos and our branches of self, pride, and by their bruising of our egos, help us release our fragrances that fill the earth around us with gladness of spirit.
Nature tells a different story of love, sharing, and caring. The question, however, is, what story is your life telling, both to the people and the nature around you? Think about this critically.
When someone, whether an artist, an engineer or a chef sets out to create something, his or her responsibility is to use nature to give it “life” while respecting that nature at every moment. During this process, the artisan becomes one with the object and flows with it. An ironworker would say that metal has a life of its own, just as someone making ceramics would say that the clay does. The Japanese are skilled at bringing nature and technology together: not man versus nature, but rather a union of the two. Excerpt from the book: Ikigai. Written by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles. Page 68.
Remember that ego, in simple terms, is how YOU think things should be; how YOU think others should be, and even how YOU think you should be. But life is not about you alone. Life is not a straight line written on a black and white paper. What if you decide to flow with the movement of Source at each moment, without a laid down principle of “how”? Life is dynamic, and so must you be.
Stay engaged, think differently, and keep being you.
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