What I am beginning to experience these days is how deeply nature can be a balm for grief.
Last year I might’ve rattled off a list of ways we can soothe ourselves in the natural world; and, those practices are helpful. But today I feel quite sure that it is the embrace of the cycles of nature that is as profoundly healing as actually doing something in nature.
In other words, I find that being in nature - as it is on this particular winter day - is simply enough for my grief.
Stillness.
Observation.
Quietude.
Announcing the day’s dawn or dusk in a whisper to myself.
The unexpected turn of my attention to a fluttering out the window this morning: there in the branches was a flicker on the same limb where yesterday a varied thrush sat.
It is the stepping back of perspective and feeling our place in the larger whole: repetitions and changes. An interconnected web that has transience at its dynamic core – in its smallest iteration (the death of an individual life, for example). And that interconnected web has constancy at its most grand scale (like the seasons, repeating).
Life means death, and that passing away leaves space for something novel to birth and grow up.
I find great comfort in the vastness and perpetualness of nature.
All blog images created & photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted. Please circulate images with photo credit: "©2019 JenniferJWilhoit/TEALarbor stories. AllRightsReserved."
