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Today's
Quotation:
Climb
the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace
will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The
winds will blow
their own freshness into you, and the
storms their energy,
while cares will drop away from you
like the leaves of Autumn.
John
Muir
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Today's
Meditation:
Nature
can give us much more than we could ever imagine, but most
of us tend not to be ready to take what it has to
offer. I think that's partly because we aren't taught
how to take it and make it our own, how to let nature calm
us down or lift our energy levels. We learn to take it
for granted, to see it as something apart from ourselves
rather than something of which we're an important part.
I
used to live in a place that had a beautiful forest about a
mile away. When I'd go running, the mile getting to
the forest was okay, but as soon as I entered the woods,
things changed. My energy level would go up
immediately, which I believe was caused by the higher level
of oxygen in the air (after all, that's what trees do,
isn't it-- create oxygen that allows us to survive?).
The trees were great company as I ran, and the paths took me
through beautiful scenes and showed me some amazing stuff,
including deer, frogs, snakes, birds, and many other animals
and parts of the natural world.
The
forest gave much to me, but only because I was willing to
accept it and acknowledge it. I was able to forget for
a time the cars and concrete and pollution and noises of the
so-called "civilized" world, and enjoy the peace
and serenity of the "wild."
And
when we think about it this way, isn't it somehow surprising
that we call our world of stress and hurry and pressure
"civilized"? And at the same time, we call
the forests and the natural world that gives us so much
peace the "wild"? For some reason, the logic
of this escapes me.
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