Nature is a new book that grabs you in the first page. The moment you set your foot to the path, you can’t wait to see where it leads. Every bend, every hill, every fork calls you to go just a little further. You don’t know where it’s going and you can’t wait to discover. Yet even as you near the end, you become torn between wanting to know how it concludes and not wanting the experience to be over…
Nature is the old book you’ve read cover to cover, over and over. It’s a path you’ve trod many times and you delight in its familiarity. You slip back into its comforts and greet the well-known landmarks. You know the way, you know the end, and so you luxuriate in the journey. Yet no matter how many times you come back to it, there’s always something new to draw your eye, things you missed before, things revealed that you hadn’t been ready to see before…
Nature is melodies and harmonies, the tune always hidden somewhere inside you. The wind ripples through the long grasses, who wave to the trees, whose graceful swaying envelopes you in the song. Water dances over stones in the streams that seek out the river, as the river yearns for the sea. The humblest puddle can contain a world all of its own, an unbreakable mirror rebounding the light from above. The chorus of insects, frogs, and birds may be words incomprehensible to you, yet you understand…
For nature is the language of all living things that your soul will always recognize. Be it the low moans of water straining under creaking ice in the depth of winter, the only sound in the stillness under the December moon, to the clash of thunder and the roar of the summer storm, reminding us of our relative powerlessness. From the rustle and crunch of desiccated leaves littering the graveyard of autumn to the rustle of wings as the hardy few who remained are joined by the returning sojourners, the song, the story continues on.
