nature – What’s here now?

A day off today between a twelve hour shift yesterday and another one tomorrow. In my old job this would have depressed me greatly but these days I couldn’t feel better about it. Such is the profound magnitude and good fortune to have work that you love. Work that is somehow an extension or expression of who and what you are. And often we don’t know who and what we are until the work allows us to express ourselves. A chicken and egg situation but such is life.

Today will be spent contemplatively, outside in nature, inside with coffee and perhaps an invigorating run down by the river later. But mostly in gratitude for, well, everything really.

It is perfectly ordinary and normal that much of what we experience makes no sense. Sense is the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, the more sense we make the further away from nature and chaos we go, until we find ourselves isolated, alone and suffocating from an excess of reason, logic and meaning.

Imagine a tree thinking it was separate from the rest of the universe. The ensuing confusion would be absurdly funny. Sound familiar? Trees are trees and humans are humans. It is our nature to think absurd things. It is also our nature to laugh. We would do well to laugh more at the predicament we create for ourselves.

Home.

Debris from the recent floodwaters caught in the branches of trees over ten feet above the river’s usual level.

The sea used to be my contemplative companion on the morning walk to work but now it’s rivers and mountains – the same ebb and flow of nature, just differing rhythms and vibrations of the whole happening.

The brook is running lower and clear again now after the deluge.

Living in such close proximity to a living, pulsing vein of nature is a clear and ever present reminder of our position in the scheme of things.

On the edge. Precarious and brittle. Vulnerable.

It’s unsettling but necessary.