A Poem
Standing Still
I have often felt nourished by Nature…. Nourished as if I was drinking from the breast of Mother Nature herself.
When I am nourished by Nature, time slows. Like molasses. Smooth and silky and sticky. When I am nourished by Nature, I notice her beauty and she rewards my attentiveness.
The other day, I sat watching a river run by like the years of our lives. Watching leaves floating on top, moving along without volition, victims of the flow.
Wondering if our lives are like the leaves’ lives gliding downstream indistinguishable, unmemorable, disconnected and dissected from the original source, where they were nourished and nurtured uniquely by Nature; naturally.
Wondering if like the leaves, with our cord and connection cut, the thin thread severed once we emerged from the canal and channel, we, too, are merely floating through life, undirected and unguided.
Remembering yet forgetting that we came into the world with a conjoined blessing and a curse, a freedom and a yearning. Freedom to fly, unencumbered, untethered, yet with a perpetual yearning for reconnection to the Original Source, our Divine Mothers, Mother Earth and Mother Nature.
The yearning, subtle yet strong at times, the still small voice summoning us softly, to the Source.
Often, we do not heed, and cannot hear because we are flying free, soaring, to a destination with an unknown and uncertain finish line, and ETA we know not, our lives entangled in a web of endless to-do lists often neither meaningful or meaningless, certainly not rememberable, under the mercy of piloted controls that we do not control,
like the leaves in the river, floating by, heading to the ultimate dam that leaves leaves in heaps like ashes.
Yet, the yearning, the quiet calling.
the call to reconnect, to remember and to recommit to practices and pauses that with patience restore and replenish our resilience.
I want to pause more and not feel rushed along without meaning or direction at the whim and will of the river of life. I want to pause more to be nourished by Nature, to suckle at her breast and be filled with the milk from the matronly matriarch of the universe.
Sometimes I want to be like the heron standing still looking and noticing. And then, calmly taking off and landing again somewhere different and then standing still looking and noticing some more.
Noticing blue gray in white clouds; noticing brown roots twisted at the river bank’s edge — their mirrored reflection in the river; noticing the flying of birds in intricate flight patterns, hearing them whistling to the Great Unseen One; noticing flowers, soft and delicate, singing silent praise to the Sun for warmth and the Rain for quenching thirst.
Sometimes I want to be one with the One, like a raindrop evaporating, rising, and melting into the blue gray clouds, waiting for the overflow, when like a released damn, I can flow back powerfully into the world again.
But for now, I just want to stand still .. like the blue heron …looking watching taking the world in with my eyes and my being. I want to stand still and be nourished by nature.
See Menah’s Matinee for a reading and listening to Meditation by Thais.
I walk, almost daily, and take pictures and videos of nature.
