Nature's Lessons

  Today is Labour Day, and some are thinking of it as the last day of summer. But somehow the natural world is still very much alive throughout Toronto, particularly in the parks and trails. And I was thinking that no matter how much I might long for summer to last forever, life continues to go on its pace. And I was also reflecting on how the natural world can teach a person about resilience in the face of change.
   If I were to lament on how much I have to get up and travel to work on weekdays, I should probably stop to reflect on what the wildfowl are doing today: preparing themselves for a winter down south. When I stop to think of it, nature doesn't need to reflect that something is either easy or hard: it never steps out of its process of just being and doing according to the instinctively coded plans of nature. The blue heron minces its steps to catch a fish along the Humber River, but does it ever need to reflect: 'it is so hard to catch a fish.'? It certainly looks challenging from a human vantage point, but the heron simply does not give up. It continues its process until it can reach the next catch. Yet somehow when I have the thought that something is hard, I am adding a layer of thought to what isn't easy or hard in and by itself. I literally 'make' things challenging by labelling them as such, rather than seeing them as unfolding causes and conditions.
    Another thing I learn from nature is that there is not much to gain or lose. Things combine and recombine to form life, but this life is subject to death and rebirth. The cicadas, for instance, may be calling out in their thin buzzing of wings, but what happens tomorrow? Perhaps their only hope of posterity is the continuation in future offspring. In the natural world, even loss is considered a gain in some future state. I wonder if perhaps observing nature can help a person let go of a specific narrow concept of life's goal. Rather than seeing life as the glorification of an individual, one can train through natural processes to see that life is always supporting other life, both across space and time. Observing the fragility of nature can lessen a person's attachment to the self.
     What holds nature together? This is a question that is hard to fathom, and it's especially hard to have faith that nature is 'held together' when even the climate is changing so fast. But when I observe the natural world, there is always some mysterious way in which animals adapt to changes and somehow even cooperate with others. The Canada geese today were all bathing on the same spot, close to the waterfall, and it was most amusing to see them all doing the same thing, as though they were in the same family. It is one example of where living beings are always in communication with each other, and this interconnection also extends to the ways things mutually relate and behave. Is it possible that all these phenomena tell us that nothing was ever really separate in the first place?