I learned about the ebb and flow of life through nature’s seasons. My spirituality is based in the lessons I’ve learned from nature, the earth, the moon, the stars. I love it all.

A nice long walk in the woods, finding a lost bubbling brook or taking a nap under the canopy of large oak trees is my kind of personal discovery. Watching television channels that deal with the wonders of nature, creations of God and animals actually bores me to maddness. I need to smell it, feel it textures with my fingers and listen to its serenitty all around me. Nature has several laws that make it what it is, one of them is balance. Too much of anything in nature can destroy or kill it off completely; the cycle of change and the unity of all life is essential for all of it to survive or flourish. The worst enemy to nature and all of its majestic wonders to be discovered is man himself and his greed. Consider the bee who carries pollen from one plant to another, this simple but momumential task is slowly being exterminated. Our entire food resource is in jeopardy and then what will we eat for food?

Nature teaches us patience, resilience, and balance. It shows how every season has a purpose, how trees stand tall despite storms, and how rivers carve their own paths. From the tiniest ants to the vast sky, nature reminds us to adapt, grow, and embrace life’s journey with grace.

I love what Hermann Hess had to say about trees

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that G_d is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.