Nature is my peace. It is my balance. It is where I live in a quiet harmony within myself. It is where there is no judgment as to good or bad, evil or the opposite. It is.
It has a voice that plays on a vibration beyond my eyes or ears, and yet, like Spirit in man, it only has its clothing, its dresses and shoes and hairstyles, in which to express itself. So its leaves dance with the wind, allowing itself to be caressed, rubbed against. It’s sensual in that. And then, as a storm rolls in, the wind shakes the leaves, branches shudder, like an orgasm, and then there’s calm again.
Nature has a secret world deep in its soil that only now science is getting to know, but I knew some of it as a child, playing in the dirt. I was lucky to live in the country until I was ten. And even afterwards, it was nature to which I flew — ran to — for my personal health. As a teenager in Santa Barbara, the worst of years, my best friend had two horses. We lived in the foothills, and every day after school we took her horses up higher into the mountains along trails, horses struggling with their footing, rocks slipping. We’d find streams, mottled with sunshine and shade, where we could listen to that voice as expressed by Nature, the rippling of water across the rocks as it rubbed against river banks. A symphony of sounds.
I often feel the problem of the world is that people live in concrete jungles. They don’t touch nature; they are not one with it. I live in a small 27-foot van on acreage at the dead end of a road; it’s dark inside that van, and inside of that darkness my thoughts in-dwell, too often finding criticism — of mankind mostly. But I never criticize or judge nature. I love its hurricanes. I love that its voice, Mother’s voice, is speaking up in a voice that humans, who can’t control it, feel is destructive: a voice of tornadoes and hurricanes and fires and floods and ravaging ways where Mother is reprimanding those who have trod on her, violated her; who refused to walk with her, or speak with her, commune with her, to help heal with her or let her heal them.
Yes, it’s all so-called destructive, and yet it’s not. It’s nature doing what nature does. And mankind screaming that it can’t control what nature does. I laugh. I think good on,you, Mother, for finally spanking your “last thought,” those children of humankind that evolved out of your simplest thoughts: the amoebas and bacterias, the globs that grew into more diverse forms. I think, okay, you’re a truly loving mother to try to clean up the mess that those errant children made.
Yes, I could well be subject of your wrath some day. I could be in the path of that tornado or fire. But in my simplicity, I don’t walk in high heels; I don’t wear the tight skirts and restricting shirts that prevent my free movement. I don’t live in concrete jungles where nothing can survive. I try to dress more in harmony and to be able to walk in your beauty down your paths or, if need be, flee your wrath. If you take me down, I also accept that that’s part of nature; it’s part of my nature that I was born, get sick, and I will die.
Sometimes I think you, Mother, would appreciate me dying soon so there’s fewer of us on this earth so that maybe, maybe some of your more precious children — all the plants and animals — have a chance to survive. But for now, you let me rock in your arms, daily. I hold your ethereal essence as you hold me in your physical form. I watch you rain and give water to all around me — sometimes too much here. I watch the ants and bees and fungi and mosquitos and beetles and all your other creations do what they do. I watch your dance across the grass outside my window, and I watch the deer come almost to my door, which I can see only through the little rear windows of my van, which is, as is your right, getting covered with moss and pollen now. I’ll let you breathe me as you are my breath.
