Humans in Nature

Everyday I try to get out and go for a walk, anywhere, somewhere, music plugged firmly in my ears I explore. I am very blessed at the moment in the fact that where I am staying I have views of the mountains in the far and close, the ocean and the most beautiful vineyards that are just changing to their autumn colours.

Todays stroll (normally more than that…) took me down the hill towards the valley that ends in the sea, it was so peaceful that I had to stop and just stare, just as I stopped Blind Melons No Rain stopped and Sarah McLaghlan’s Angels began singing to my soul. I looked out towards the ocean and felt the distant waves crash against me, its force and energy wrapping me in the awe of what it really is to be the ocean.

If one steps back and looks at how the ocean is in nature you will notice that on some days it can look so flat with only a few light waves touching the sand underneath your feet… The ocean has days where the storms rock it so hard that the waves seem to do somersaults in the air, other days when the wind takes the spray and flings it in your face only to have the calmness take it over yet again the next. So much like life, yours and mine, like the ocean.

I stood there at the end of the hill staring at the ocean and when Sarah changed to U2’s Walkon I found myself flicking the back switch to bring her voice back to my soul. I then started my walk back up the hill and I was struck at how many trees stood upright and how many were growing at a slant depending on which side of the hill they stood or where they were planted. Again I stopped in wonder and was struck once again by the fact that trees are also so much like us, or should I say we are so like tree’s, you and I. The wind can batter us left, right and centre and yet we still stand strong as if our roots are so embedded in the soul beneath us that even though the wind tries to pull us out, deroot us, we stay, holding on tight to what we are.

The skew trees reminded me how we often can learn certain responses from the things we have been through, how when we are battered by wind long and hard enough we tend to take a certain stance in life. But unlike trees we are able to reroot ourselves and the kinks we have in our bark make us stronger for it, we can grow back, only stronger. We might lose a few leaves, our branches might break but ultimately it is within all of us to grow straight if we choose to do so. It is after all ultimately a choice that we can make, right or wrong, the choice is ours how we interpret the wind and its effect on us.

Sarah came once again to an end and I realised what a spectacle I was making of myself just standing there in the road staring at trees so I decided to let Savage Garden’s Crash & Burn play on. I continued my meander up the hill when my lungs started to tell me they were not happy with my continued smoking, I talked them down and let the left one know that I had heard it loud and clear. Now with more determination to strum into my head the evils of smoking I started walking faster and faster up the hill (steeeeeep) when I literally stopped dead in my tracks yet again almost falling over, there in front of me were the most beautiful flowers.

Bright and beautiful they stood out against the stark summer beaten gardens showing off in full view the ever present water restrictions. I was struck yet again at just how beautiful they are and how alike us humans are to them, we are spiritual buds that slowly open and bloom… some flowers closing at night like our spirits only to bloom bigger and brighter yet. They take the rain and they continue to grow, they weather the storms and they grow, they may shed their petals but they grow back, more buds come and they bloom once more.

If you think about it, us humans are really just an extension of nature, we also weather the seas of life, we get the winds that try and knock us off our feet and we bloom from buds to the world in our awakenings that come on our life’s journey.

To take it a step further… in every part of this world there is day and there is night, in some lands the nights are longer than the days and in others its visa versa. No matter what happens there is day after night, in our seasons there is spring after winter only to be followed by summer… how much like life is our surrounding world, how much like humans is it really?