Feeling Nature

Moving out of the bubble of daily life sounds so easy.  Just look up and out.  But routines and everyday concerns crowd around us so tightly that soon our vision seems to shrink down to questions such as “What should I eat?  Who feels annoying?  Can I count shopping as exercise?  Where do I find the money for that bill?”  No wonder we have trouble breathing and dreaming and feeling like more.  We live in tiny force fields that can not only keep the light of living out, but can also hold the crabbiness of life in.

One solution I forget periodically is to abandon the bubble altogether by spending time in a larger reality—outdoors.  It’s easy to bring your bubble with you, so you’ll need to use willpower to dissolve it.  Some people can jog or shoot hoops with the neighbors or prepare the garden for next year.  My bubble is unusually resilient so I choose to travel beyond the familiar.  Lately, the destination that works for me has been a local mountain lake.

The tourists are mostly gone now, taking their shorts and boom boxes and plastic chairs with them.  The wind can carry an autumn chill.  Most tourists zip past on the highway, snug behind their car windows, pausing only to snap shots with their smart phones.  I sit on ancient rocks exposed by the elements, not far from the gentle lapping of waves against the shore.  Sometimes I meditate, but just being there where my fretting begins to sound trivial and petulant beside the gigantic ponderosa pines can be a meditation in itself.

As I feel for a sense of the other lives that have passed near this place over the centuries, I recall that mine is but a moment that I can treasure or squander as I choose.  Overhead, two ospreys swoop and call to one another as they coordinate their fishing strategies, and I hear in their calls an echo of the casual conversations my husband and I had over breakfast.  In spite of our pride, we are no more or less than they—“occupants” that will one day move on, hopefully without unduly damaging the areas we’ve called home.

The hawks don’t sit and complain about how long they might live or what the food supply might be next spring or whether their young will make competent adults.  They simply do the best they can with each moment.  I needed this reminder.  I’m glad to be alive, to be able to feel the power of the fall storms, to see the magnificence of autumn.  I’ll tend to the broken cell phone and check engine light on the car and mice in the attic another day.  Today I’m simply happy to be.