Trees on Global Warming

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). It is not a difference I can describe, the closest I can come to it, maybe, is to say that they (trees) were different in the heat. They were wild, blissful, somehow fully themselves, in the heat. This is not to say that they are not fully themselves when the weather is cooler, they were simply themselves differently. As I noticed it I also noticed that I am separated from the heat, resisting it, trying to manage it somehow, which was not what the trees were doing. So I decided to open the same way trees open, following their example, and as soon as I made this choice – I did open. Spontaneously, naturally, I changed…I was still aware of the hot sun on my skin but it was not a disturbance anymore. It was me, I became it, and everything else. The weather, my surroundings, the sun, the hot air – it all was me, literally, it was an expression of me, another aspect of me. And I knew that when the evening comes, sun goes down, air cools – I will shift spontaneously, naturally, and that will be me also. All of it, everything, was nothing else but an expression of me, of who I am, uniquely, in reality. This is how nature is, it would seem – this is a way of being I learned from nature. This is not something that can be understood, measured. Nature doesn’t DO anything, it only is, it’s in a realm of BEING, not DOING. As I walked home I thought – what would all those scientists who talk about how global warming kills earth say if they could experience what I experienced today? If they had this insight into how Nature is, how threes are – what would they say? I believe that nature is a great teacher, a great model, for humans. We are so used to dealing with mind and through mind that we cannot, generally, conceive that there is anything other than mind. We describe our reality from mind’s point of view, we make predictions about our reality from mind’s point of view. But mind’s point of view is extremely limited. There is no limitation in nature.