Participating in the life of nature (16 December)
Yesterday evening, sat by an open fire, in the sofa with Ria, knitting and talking. I read to her out of the book “Love of nature and the end of the world”. An exert from Chapter 1 – the Strange Phosphorescence of Life: Solitude, Selfhood and the Void. I have been particularly sitting with the following quote: “Though the natural world knows death, it cannot be divided into living and non-living. ‘Living form’ does not distinguish animal from plant from mineral. A river is alive in this sense, as is a landscape. Either everything is alive in this sense, or nothing is”.
So I’m busy with the nature of life and participating in the life of nature, as nature. Watching the orchids in my bathroom as they put out shoots, buds, flowers – taking the time they take. Nothing to be done to hurry them on. And I, too, am part of nature when I live in accordance with its rhythms, without striving to be part of the mechanical society which has so many of us in its thrall – and all the rest are somehow ‘rejects’ or ‘waste’.
This participation in the mystery of life is where I find the magic and the juice. And it is everywhere – because it is in our listening and our seeing. We hear it when we listen to the living silence that is the matrix that carries all sound. We see it when we allow our eyes – also the eyes of our understanding – to travel beyond the surface, through the water and into the depths beyond. When we allow our sensing to go beyond our skin in both directions.
