Every single day I ship a FB publish into what looks like a Nice Void together with nature images that I took round the home or within the woods that morning or the day earlier than. There may be all the time One thing. Coalescing early morning ideas with latest photos helps me orient myself to the day to return, reminding me to be Current to Now.
Now could be my solely Refuge.
In these posts I additionally hope to seize an viewers by picture if not by phrases, introducing or reinforcing folks’s constructive relationship to nature earlier than it’s too late. My intention is twofold. Assist others to see nature in all her surprise, and to encourage people who learn the textual content to suppose creatively, to query, to problem what has been normalized.
Does anybody take note of these efforts? The reply might be that few do, and but I persist. I recall what Pulitzer Prize successful writer Richard Powers states, specifically that ‘hope is a willingness to have interaction with the longer term’. Outcomes will not be the purpose.
As a naturalist I’m wed to the earth. That I’m witnessing Earth’s sorrow, struggling and even perhaps her rage is actuality. That we can not separate the earth from our lives can be actuality. Denial or not. That pleasure can nonetheless be felt sensed skilled by dwelling within the current is a 3rd actuality. Sharing my little posts helps me to move these concepts/emotions on.
I embody at the moment’s publish for example.
“WHAT IS THE EARTH ASKING OF US?
Each writer/scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer and scholar / writer Amitav Ghosh ask the identical query in numerous methods.
Kimmerer solutions that the earth asks to be thanked for the presents that s/he brings us, and that Gratitude is vital.
Ghosh solutions the query by the story of how one plant introduced down a civilization and what this is perhaps saying in regards to the intelligence of nature that could be working beneath the radar -the fires the flood droughts colonization, wars, misogyny racism and so on. can’t be separated and all are all telling us one thing…
Each And.
I ponder what would occur if each particular person queried this query to nature after which LISTENED to any reply that may materialize by a thought or an motion – – –
Do I hear 1000’s of responses?
That is after I suppose that it is perhaps doable to alter the world.
Yesterday after I stood beneath my beloved hydrangea whose pearl white blossoms rivel that of the moon’s blue mild listening to the hum of bees, I heard the cosmos singing.
The various and the one.
There’s extra to this story. Yesterday I additionally heard my virtually 33 -year- outdated dove Lily b thrashing round his lavatory bower. One thing had frightened him badly. Racing into his room – he’s a free flying dove that has by no means been caged – I feared that he might need harm himself accidently. Lily spends his days in a plant window that’s open overhead. Though he’s utterly secure, he doesn’t really feel that approach if a predator is close to. Hawks can see him from above and typically dive bomb the window sending him right into a frenzy. After discovering him huddled in a nook I picked him up, soothed him with phrases, and positioned him on his protected evening roosting perch to get well.
Think about my shock after I entered the lounge, and a large hawk was sitting within the close by cherry tree. It took a second to determine the Pink Tail earlier than he flew instantly at me, hovering within the air inches in entrance of the window tail feathered fanned out behind him. He repeated this conduct three occasions in all earlier than flying away. Surprised virtually mindless, my coronary heart pounded involuntarily I simply stood there dumbly. This was private and scary; each cell was vibrating in my physique.
When a jumble of ideas tumbled into consciousness the hawk’s messenger side got here first. Nature was speaking with me by one in all her creatures, however what S/he was saying was not clear.
By no means in all these years had I witnessed this conduct in a hawk. Was this some form of warning? It positive felt that approach as my thoughts flew by all of the occasions the hawk had come to me over time… usually together with household. Typically ‘his’ messages had been benign; typically not (I solely skilled hawk as male). However 3 times? This sounded legendary; in fairy tales happenings happen in threes.
I’ve no reply to what this startling look would possibly imply to me personally and even collectively, however I’m on excessive alert as a result of nature routinely communicates with me by vegetation, animals and birds. Sadly, typically it’s months, even years earlier than I comprehend why a visitation occurred.
The purpose of together with this unfinished story is to reveal that growing an intimate relationship with nature in any of her points does weave an individual into the tapestry of the entire if we’re open to the fact that it’s doable.
In The Nutmeg’s Curse Amitav Ghosh means that human/ animal communication is the oldest of our ‘animal’ traits, and that Nature was telling tales lengthy earlier than people ever inhabited the earth.
My life experiences point out to me that he’s proper.
