Nature
I walked around trees this morning, listening. They are different in rain, serene, quiet.
I expected to feel the quietness from them, sleepiness almost, because they were so still. Instead I felt an incredible, indescribably powerful aliveness. It was quite amazing to feel it – the trees were so powerfully alive, more alive that I have ever experienced myself, or anything other than myself, to be.
Their aliveness did not require action, did not need “doing”, did not need emotions, excitement, passion, need, terror, pain, pleasure … it did not express itself in movement, it expressed itself purely and only as itself … nothing else … just pure, absolute aliveness, only that, nothing more.
It makes me think that we, humans, are really missing something here. We seem to believe that one has to move to be alive. One has to feel, need, want, desire, fear.
Do all the needs, drives, passions, emotions make us alive, or do they distract us from being alive?
I walked my dog late this morning. It was about 11am and already really, really hot. Ojai is a very hot place, summers are sometimes hard for me to handle. I come from a much colder country and I don’t think I’m constructed for this level of heat – it numbs me down, saps my energy, muddles my head, turns me into a zombi. I usually spend summer days in Ojai in whatever air conditioned spot I can find, emerging only in the evening, when it gets cooler.
There was no help for it today though, Ghani needed to be walked so away we went. As I walked surrounded by hot air, under a glaring sun, trying not to react too much, I became aware of a change in nature. Trees felt different, there was an aspect to them that usually is not there (or that usually I can’t feel).
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German Tots Learn to Answer Call of Nature
By MIKE ESTERL
April 14, 2008
IDSTEIN, Germany – Each weekday, come rain or shine, a group of children, ages 3 to 6, walk into a forest outside Frankfurt to sing songs, build fires and roll in the mud. To relax, they kick back in a giant “sofa” made of tree stumps and twigs.
The birthplace of kindergarten is returning to its roots. While schools and parents elsewhere push young children to read, write and surf the Internet earlier in order to prepare for an increasingly cutthroat global economy, some little Germans are taking a less traveled path – deep into the woods.
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So are trees “born” enlightened?
So glad you asked 🙂
Yesterday, during my morning walk, I was passing a tree on the street – and suddenly stopped dead in my tracks cause it occurred to me: this tree is only what it is. It is a tree.
It seemed a wonderful realization at the time, and it does still. Tree is a tree. It’s nothing else, it’s never been anything else. It is fully, completely and only itself.
I am not sure, therefore, if the term “enlightened” applies to trees at all, or to nature at large. “Enlightenment” describes a realization, doesn’t it? A realization of one’s true nature. But how can one realize something one always was?
I don’t think that, at any point of tree’s existence, does the tree “realize” it is a tree. Tree simply … is … a tree. And nothing else.
I think that we, humans, have so much trouble being who we are because we don’t really want to. We want to understand who we are, know who we are, discover who we are, realize who we are, we want to get enlightened, find enlightenment – we want to DO all kinds of things.
But all we have to do is – nothing. We just have to BE.
We, humans, have refined and perfected DOING. It is my observation that nature has refined and perfected BEING.
I visited a desert yesterday, completed with dusty, sun bleached rocks, Joshua trees, dried, scrubby bushes and majestic mountains surrounding the valley. Some of them looked like they were floating few inches above ground – random rock formations or nearly symmetrical cones emerging from the flatness which, at a distance, seemed incredibly smooth. On the other side the mountains were high and capped by snow.
The first impression I got after emerging from my car was that this is not a place for people to live. There are some settlements there, not really towns. There is a supermarket, some houses, and they are all in the wrong place. The “civilization” does not belong in the desert.
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