Everything Comes & Goes In Nature....Except 🌿💨✨

Everything Comes & Goes

Hello Reader

Spring Equinox is tomorrow! And, depending on where you are, you may or may not have visible clues of spring's arrival.

Here in the inland PNW, we've had both a taste of winter and a taste of spring within a week. Last weekend saw the first real snow in the mountains. This week, at lower elevations, we're at a balmy 75° and blooms are popping.

I've been re-reading The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen, a marvelous travelogue and nature-wisdom tale steeped in concrete physical details of the landscape he moves through.

How nature, and weather, and life, "comes and goes" is a recurring theme and phrase in the book. The phrase has both Buddhist and Daoist roots and branches.

We'll explore the phrase this week, of how it can be a kind of flexible anchor and guide as the seasons change in a swirling world.

Cheers,

Jennifer

Founder, Ordinary Nature

Weekly Reflection 🌨☀️✨
Weekly Practice 💨🍃✨
Little Tender Things 🌷💚

WEEKLY REFLECTION

Everything Comes & Goes...Except __________

Jennifer Ruth Keller

The skiff of wind ruffles the lake, darkening the surface with fast-moving shadow. High above, against the forested hills the incoming snow blows sideways. Backlit by sun, it takes me a few beats to place what is going on. Oh - it's a snow sun shower! I exclaim inside myself. Is there a word for that? I wonder.

The breeze reaches me, brushes my face, rustles the pine boughs near me, their limbs freed of snow after a sun-melt day. Across thirty-six hours in the mountains I've seen hundreds of alterations in the weather, the light, the state of the forest, the vibe of my heart.

At an annual women's retreat, I've gone from the ripe gratitude of feeling seen and held by friends, to the delight at being reminded of how doing random things for fun is an essential good of life, to the need for rich solitude by myself with the trees, to tiny flurries of questioning when familiar yet still vexing emotions rise in my body, to the release that happens when I behold mountain water fringed by forest.

Back at home, in the "city," in the flow and scatter of routines, I more often get tripped up by the coming and going of what I call "all the things." Up in the mountains, with the lake and the trees around me, I'm more able---more allowed, perhaps---to receive the coming and goings of my thoughts, of my heart, with less harsh spaciousness, with a lighter, more self-compassionate touch.

We don't "go into nature" in order to get rid of the comings and goings, the interior motions of our and spirit. We create time and space with nature, in collaboration with a greater order, in order to let the comings and goings be held---and ventilated, and, I would say, even tended---by something beyond us.

For some people that "something" might be God. Or Spirit. Or the natural cosmos. Or Source. Or Great Maker. Or the Holy Wild. Or ______________. Sometimes the naming may matter. And sometimes maybe it doesn't.

For me, what matters most, is loosening the hold on my heart and my will just enough to let the skiff of wind come and touch me, and bring me into connection with the wild possibility that everything is enough, that goodness is real, and that little gifts of belonging are actually on offer all the time when I let it be so.

[For a little video accompaniment to see the wind skiff click here.]

WEEKLY PRACTICE INVITATION

The what: Seasonal change + coming & going

Give yourself the gift, sometime in the next few days, of 20 minutes of "no goal" or "no destination" time somewhere outside.

Could be your yard. A park. The woods. A public garden. (Can't get outside? Try a gaze out the window, or, working with a special memory or photo of a nature space you are drawn to.)

What is coming & going in the outdoor setting you are in?

What does each of your senses notice, as clues to the shift in seasons?

Add on, if it feels right for you: Do you notice internal comings & goings? In your mind? Your heart? Your body?

How might you notice them with a light touch, and gentle tending, with less harshness or judgment?

Maybe: your breathing is a balm around each one.

Maybe: another being in nature is with you, as a gentle witness, to simply allow the "comings & goings" to be.

There are no "rules" here -- just suggestions to try, and explore, and do feel free to share with me what seems to "work" with your particular variations!