Breathe in. Breathe out.Breathe in. Breathe out.Forget this and attaining Enlightenmentwill be the least of your problems.
It amazes me that we do not stop to think more often. Life's truth, life's mystery, life's rewards touch us every day. It is hard not to be whimsical:
Zen is not easy.It takes effort to attain nothingness.And then what do you have?
Mother Teresa said, "We need silence to be able to touch souls." James Thurber said: "Nowadays most men live lives of noisy desperation." Why is the middle ground here so hard to sustain?
The British Romantics had the secret. Wordsworth found in nature "a presencea sense sublimea motion and a spiritthat rolls through all things." Nature never did betray the heart that loved her, Wordsworth said.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "A man is related to all nature." That relationship is hard to define: "A town is saved not more be the righteous men in it than the woods and swamps that surround it," Henry David Thoreau.
To be alive is to be nature! "In nature nothing is perfect and everything is perfect," Alice Walker said. We struggle with imperfection and even wish at times to be freed from the struggle.
George Herbert said, "I wish I were a tree then I should grow to fruit or shade. Some bird would trust her household to me and I should be just." We are driven to seek fulfilment if not perfection.
Yet how much more are we than the tree, the bird or the rock? By virtue of our redemption by Christ we are greater than the angels, greater than non-sentient beings. But it is often our capacity for thought that leads us to unhappiness.
Every day we touch nature. The sun shines on our faces; we inhale the fragrant breeze. The wind touches us even through our parkas. A man is related to all nature! We are imperfect in nature and at the same time perfect.
"Keep the love of nature for it is the true way to understand art more and more," Vincent van Gogh. Nature is the real mirror that distorts not reality, which art may do.
Only the calm in life allows us to see the deepest truths. We need silence and God's gift of time. "Silence is the true friend that never betrays," Confucius. "Silence is a source of great strength," Lau Tzu. And Elizabeth Kubler Ross said, "Get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose."
I will leave it to the reader to balance nature, contemplation and a life well lived. I depart with these thoughts: "And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life." F. Scott Fitzgerald.
And
"It is never too late to be what you might have been." George Eliot.
