Nature

My reading lately has me in a book about grief and sorrow. It includes two other books about Qi Gong, the 4000 year old Chinese system of health, balance and spiritual wisdom on which Traditional Chinese Medicine is founded. Lydia and I are reading a book about the power of our breathing. At some point, usually early, in each of these books, the same devastating observation is made.  Human beings are inherently a part of nature, but since the onset of the Industrial Age, we have become increasingly separate from it. We spend the vast majority of our time indoors surrounded by sheetrock, plastic, metal, artificial light and swimming in unseen radio and electrical waves that run all of our devices.  

And it makes us sick. It leaves us feeling isolated, lonely, depressed, angry, agitated and with a deep but also vague sense that something is terribly wrong. 

We are made of the same stuff as the trees and the deer that just ran through the woods just outside my window as I write this. We are made of the same stuff as the sun that is finally breaking through all of the rain and wind of late. We are made of the same stuff as that rain and the flooded rivers and the oceans that encircle this earth. We are made of the same stuff as the stars, but when is the last time we really gazed for any length of time at the stars or the moon that is full right now as I write this?

Nature calls to return to who we are. We can find some way, today, for a few minutes even, to return ourselves to nature.  It might be standing in a window and visually connecting with a tree outside.  It could be a walk down your street and bringing your attention to the trees and plants along the way. It might be to sit on your porch or deck or sidewalk and watch the birds and squirrels, or the sky. Take in some sunlight, or talk to the moon. 

One trip won’t do, but if we begin to return ourselves to contact with nature, we will begin to find that isolation and loneliness shifting inside of us. It will shift into something else. Sages call it our soul, our center, our true self, our connection with the divine in all things. 

~Bob Patrick