Where We Belong
Camping along the banks of a favorite lake over the weekend, I was put right, again, by the rare and lovely landscape of my home in the Nebraska Sandhills. My daughter’s visit prompted the excursion, and though the weather was windy and cold, time spent in the company of ones held dear never makes for a regrettable adventure.
Nature’s Embrace
When I fret for the future—as I often do when I think of my grown children and their children, and I compare current events to memories of a happiness I knew when I was young and oblivious to the evils that were surely going on, even then—it always helps to revisit the world as it exists in the patient embrace of nature. The world we instinctively inhabit as children. This kingdom of grass and sky with its wind-terraced hills and mirroring waters provides a perfect place to do just that when we take the time and intention to rest in “the peace of the wild things” (to quote a favorite phrase by Wendell Berry).
There, in the lavender hush of twilight descending upon the lake, I was reminded how casually removed we are, as a species, from the very environment that is our home, and how strange that is if you stop to consider. Any brief observation of nature reveals an ancient wisdom, still in force, that informs every life form on this planet (for those with eyes to see it). From the delicate blossoms waiting for the sun and other elements of the atmosphere to inform the timing of their emergence, to the clannish calling of the geese in private conversation as they wing their way through the trackless skies, none of them ask for timelines or maps or instruction; they simply take their cues from the wider world with which they are intimately connected. For them, it is an easy acceptance of an ancient unfolding; a simple, reliable system from which to draw one’s direction for living. It is only humankind who trouble themselves with a perceived need for “improvement” or “management” over processes much more complex and wiser than we are even capable of interpreting, never mind refining.
A Contagious Peace
When the wind had died and the quiet glow of sunset stretched its rose-colored light across the calm surface of the lake, we watched as mated swans glided silently by, without effort; their peace—neither earned nor constructed—becoming contagious. Witnessing such a simple display of easy grace, I was reminded that our own restlessness is a state from which we can recover. It is our own failure to trust in the blessings and abundance of this wondrous, third rock from the sun, and our place within it, that slows our awakening to its splendor. Too much of our time is spent living from a mindset that has forgotten the value of the simple and the small.
But on the banks of a lake, under a vast, star-sparkled sky, in the company of loved ones, the call of a goose is more than enough; the sight of swans, plenty. We are blessed in this life not by what we own, but by what we are willing to notice and allow into our experience; when we sink into the peace of the wild things, and remember we still belong to this earth.
