THE HARDEST AXIOM OF BEING HUMAN

I spend a lot of time in nature. I consider it a countercultural act in today’s society, as I spend my time in nature without doing anything, I learn everything gets done.

Nature teaches us the art of enoughness, as Wendell Berry so eloquently writes about, and is my personal experience as well. Spending time in nature it not always joyful and serene, it can be confronting and painful just as much.

The times that nature provides me with comfort and calm is when my heart and mind at not at war and I find myself at peace with my reality. Those times I see the magic and wonder in everything and all makes sense as it is, it just does, no words necessary.

Other times however, as of which I’ve had a few when looking back at 2024, I find myself dying a bit, cold-hearted and inconsolable, which has obviously nothing to do with our beautiful mother nature.  

Those times that I speak of are the days that I am struggling to meet my own needs, the days that I do not know how to tend to my own inner garden and live up to my own expectations. On those days in nature I have to become radically honest with myself and practice my surrender to reality, free myself from all my unrealistic standards and irrational self-imposed expectations.

Nature just demands that. As the famous John Muir so accurately put it:” I went to the woods to lose my mind…” Well, he couldn’t have said it any better. And he’s right really, it should be mandatory to lose your mind, as it bares no truth over our hearts and souls. Yes, it inquires, and processes, yet, it’s not here to be our authority, to show us how life is done. As was the mirroring nature gave, gives me.

It may be that nature invented love to teach us the art of enoughness

to learn how to open the heart to another without condition or expectation, to be fully welcomed in another heart in order to learn the hardest axiom of being: that we are, and always were, enough.

Much love,

Dyonne