No matter where you live, nature is inviting you to take part in the great belonging.
The great belonging is that feeling of expansion, reflection, connection, and awe when you feel connected to something bigger than yourself. When all at once, you feel the beauty, wonder, and grandiosity of the planet.
The great belonging is the intersection of connection, nature, and spirituality.
Connecting to nature and spirituality is key in the city. There’s an intelligence that lies in nature that our constructed systems and structures have yet to tap into and replicate to a great degree in the city. However, those who live in the city can actively curate experiences and an attitude of awareness that fosters connection. By creating places and situations that evoke the intelligence, charm, and delight in nature, you feed yourself.
In the city, you may need this type of reflectiveness that nature gives you even more than you do living side-by-side with nature when you live in a rural or suburban home. Cities seem to force people inward more, as they strive to contend with the noise around them. The forcing inward creates narrower and narrower pathways and perspectives of the human mind. Traveling these for too long decreases your imagination, happiness, and sense of connection.
Nature, while evoking reflection in you, connects you to life on a larger scale – it enlarges you.
You need nature. We need nature. Because you need to constantly enlarge your soul, in order to keep up with the pace of urban life around you. You need to tap into your expansiveness to bring hope and humanity to the world.
There’s an allowing that most need to have in order to connect with this expansiveness. For some, who are unaccustomed to allowing the expansion in, the little delights of nature, a new leaf, a lone bird on the water, a grassy patch waving in the wind, these thing go unnoticed.
Nature may be a lover, who the more that they are courted, noticed, and appreciated – the more they show up and give back in return.
I’ve spent so much of my life courting nature, that its easy for me to engage quickly with a naturescape. It isn’t always immediate or without effort, but given time, the ways in which nature starts giving back and playing can become more regular.
Nature is happy to play and engage. Its not always gentle, and not without its dangers (what love is?), but nature doesn’t harm simply to harm. Any entity that you engage with has its risks and uniqueness. Those idiosyncrasies are sometimes dangerous, but you would not want to remove the world of them, any more than you would want to remove all fire to avoid the burn.
You must accept yourself as the humans you are and allow play. Children become the role models in this respect – you begin to learn more from them than you ever teach them, when out in nature.
Nature and children both jump, roll, burrow, and burst forth. They swing, they sing, and they spring.
They disrupt pattern after pattern for adults.
Stanford University did a study where they found that 90% of your thoughts today are the same, completely identical as your thoughts yesterday. This will continue on and on and on until you have a pattern interrupt.
Reading an article like this, taking a walk in a new place, and engaging with a new species can be that window into the pattern interrupt. It can open your mind to new thoughts, open your life to a new trajectory.
The pin oak tree, the mayfly, the red squirrel.
Do they need a pattern interrupt? Is there timeline something that they are even aware of?
The plants have an understanding of time which follows a different pace than humans. In my book Talk to the Trees: Wake up to Wisdom, Wonder, and Calm, the chapters are words channeled from the trees. The trees talk about their timeline which spans years or decades, and at the most fine points, seasons, rather than looking at things on an hour-by-hour, or minute-by-minute basis.
Until you are in awe of everything living and earthy – the scent of pine, the pink gladiolas unfurling throat, the flick of a blue jay’s tail. You will not swim or swirl with the infinite.
Until you let a violet be a wake-up call.
Until you notice the anklet of moss and necklace of vines around a tree, which cracks open your eyes to see.
Until you see ways in which everything around you is a person- not a person as in human, but a person as in, an entity, a being who lives.
Until then, you will not realize how deeply you belong to life. How deeply you belong to the forest, to the field, to the force of elements.
You are surrounded by silent friends, by non-human family. The land pulses with life, even in the depths of the city.
Notice what elements of nature crack open the door of trust & connection for you.
Is it purple petals? Is it animal eye contact?
A sweeping vista or the long vines of a cowpea, trailing up a garden fence?
When you have a frequent practice of nature connection and belonging, you deepened your relationship.
You immerse yourself in the wonder and beauty of life-not as a holiday outing, an occasional seasonal encounter, but a daily breathing with the essence of life itself.
This is what your body and soul calls for. This is what you desire. This is where you belong.
