Nature Awakens

The Invitation

Nature is always initiating dialogue with us and we are responding to its deepest gifts that come to us in real time, in multi-dimension and in living motion. As the rain begins to fall we may live into a narrative of refreshing and renewal without our conscious awareness, our body sensing the moisture, the beyond description smell of rain reaching into our nostalgic memory and the parable of sound bringing news of profound hope in each drop of rain that falls to the ground. Our body is receiving a language beyond words. Our soul, if it is awake, is the interpreter.

John Muir, the great explorer and conservationist, was once visiting a friend overnight. He had determined to sleep indoors, which was something unusual for him, having chosen the expansive outdoors for his accommodations long ago. When a windstorm came through the valley, Muir was not able to stick to his plan. Something was calling to him. He went out into the forest, hiked a nearby ridge where he found a stand of Douglas Spruce. He climbed the tallest tree there, a hundred feet high. From his perch, he swayed back and forth with the rhythm of the wind in twenty to thirty degree arcs becoming exhilarated with the communion he found there. He recounts what I consider to be an almost “altered consciousness” experience in his book The Mountains of California, using metaphor in an attempt to convey something beyond language.

...the shining foliage was stirred by corresponding waves of air. Oftentimes

these waves of reflected light would break up suddenly into a kind of beaten

foam, and again, after chasing one another in regular order, they would seem to

bend forward in concentric curves, and disappear on some hillside, like sea-

waves on a shelving shore.

Others have also imbibed nature in a way that transformed or even transfigured the person and the work. Henry David Thoreau lived by Walden’s Pond and merged with his natural surroundings until the truth of it spilled out of him as words that became a classic work of literature, Walden.

Walt Whitman, who in some inexplicable way has crossed over the time barrier to become a friend of mine, well, at the very least a mentor. In his epic work “Leaves of Grass” there is a piece called “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” I’m convinced he lived that poem through his body at an unconscious level before it was transfigured into something tellable. It is so visceral that it comes across in the same state of hyper-wakefulness that he must have been living in to.

His lines read like a confession of the soul:

...Out of the Ninth-month midnight,

Over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander'd alone, bareheaded, barefoot, 5

Down from the shower'd halo,

Up from the mystic play of shadows, twining and twisting as if they were alive,

Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,

From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,

From your memories, sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,

From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears, 10

From beginning notes of yearning and love, there in the mist,

From the thousand responses of my heart, never to cease, ...

These are ones who have found their lives wrapped up and fused with nature in a way that has changed them, made them more alive, caused them to awaken. Something below the surface stirred and there was discovery of something new, parts of themselves that were always there but hidden beneath the surface until nature was invited to come in and make itself at home. They were transformed, as was their work.

When was your last rendezvous with nature?

Writing Prompt For The Week: Visceral