Culture Moment: Georgia Nature Musings

[Journal Entry - Autumn 2012] Even The Leaves Are Letting Go

I spent all day outside at Arabia Mountain - listening to the wind, talking to the trees, watching Nature work her Autumn magic, just thinking: there's so much beauty and intelligence here. I'm noticing Georgia's flora and fauna has more dimension it seems, more depth... she moves you with the sway of her hips, weaving the light and the dark through her landscapes, something I didn't see often enough back in the Land of the Gods...

When life shatters you awake, you become obsessed with the idea of home. You talk yourself into believing that some vague memory of playing by the lake with your cousins on a warm, silky summer night is where you will return to - to a family with open, loving arms, restored to hope by the transforming power of tragedy. The perfect contrast to the concrete jungle, to the constant commotion, noise, and shallow people. I was going home. And people were jealous. Deep in their hearts they too longed for that home they couldn't return to. In LA, we were runaway children, united as Middle America refugees, and here I was, turning my back on the tribe. My self-seeking had prevailed; my life had been redeemed. I had a home that wanted me back, someone was missing me...

The truth was, I had no home to come home to.

But today, I really just let myself surrender - to this social orphanage, this starting over one more time, and to a new Nature I'd never noticed in such sharp relief: it was this part of her I wasn't ready to accept and didn't quite understand. I laid down atop a large rock outcrop, closed my eyes, opened my arms, and just died. I gave up all the old horizons I'd been chasing. I could breathe in the living intelligence all around me and I - emptied - asked it to show me her secrets - the tender and carefully placed paradox behind her scraggly tree limbs, her mossy pools, her neutral tones, and the beautiful creations she was so adamant about destroying.

I wandered back through some of my time with her....

I remembered how exciting it was to dare her in her fury as she threw her flashing whips across threatening skies, snapping and spinning the clouds on their axes... slowly lulling me into the hum of her dark spell, and secretly wanting her to unleash more of her wild downpours and whipping winds on our boring, pathetic lives... or how the first bittersweet smell of decaying leaves used to break my heart, reminding me that firefly light shows and cricket choirs don't last forever... ever revealing again and again the promise inherent in all her changes, and showing me that even the leaves can let go.... For some curious reason, I feel safer in her stormy, rocking arms than under the endless embrace of sunkissed skies... and I'm becoming aware that I no longer have that tired and weary child tugging at my heart asking, "can we please go home?"

She has more poignancy. She has a deeper, drumming prowess. Like a stealth panther, more moody and cruel, but it adds to her art, making her this vulnerable, yet violently passionate dancer. She has a wider range of technique and flow - an edge to her elegance, and I think that's what I'm finding more of now... this deep, unlimited depth, like the yins and the yangs that paddle evolution forward - where the old surrenders breathlessly in the undertow - the backwash of time - giving way to a greater expression of the new, reborn as a bubbling, zealous crest atop a mighty wave, until it banks again in due time..

I looked up at the plane in the sky from where I was laying and thought about the people up there, in their own little world - perhaps complaining about the in-flight service or putting the finishing touches on a power point or digging through their purse for a benzodiazapam. Their whole awareness tucked so tightly, like little pigtails, under their worldly helmets as they soldiered onward.... unaware of this great, expansive space I was losing my entire life to down here. Perhaps all of those gurus I met while walking labyrinths were right, I suppose. Maybe we do live in deep, cosmic pools of perspective. Some large, some small, dual here, non-dual there... but I'm glad I am finding more and more reflections in deeper and deeper pools. It will probably be my greatest gift in the end.

Autumn is all about surrender. It's like Mother Nature is delicately kissing her beautiful masterpiece goodbye by changing the color of the leaves and surrendering them to the wind.... I will follow her.

Blue Skies,