Wonder is the state that safeguards the innocence which resides in the heart of all dreams, wishes, magic and love. If we peel back the filters of cynicism, we would begin to look with wonder again. You know, like we used to do when we were children.

Here are just a few aspects of nature that awaken my own childish sense of wonder…

Feathers

The arching spine from which fronds of feathers
lie in perfect placement.
Expressing vibrant coloration and iridescent loveliness,
or pure white snowy fluffiness,
or deep black coal glossiness.
The variety of feathers in all their forms,
embodying hope, enabling flight.

Shells

The carmine curves and sweeping lines
divide the inner chambers of the shell.
Brittle, fragile, protective… home.
Perfect spirals stemming from the heart
out into the world.
An ammonite revealed and revealing.

Trees

Tall, reaching skywards
with branches extended, the uppermost leaves
tracing patterns in the air.
Roots planted deep within the earth traveling across
and down, searching for sustenance to support the superstructure.
The heartwood whispering its secrets to the birds.

Rainbows

The rain refracts the light,
bends it bowlike across stormclouds and the approaching blue.
The white light divides and sends streamers of the purest shades of
red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, indigo,
connecting earth to heaven.
A promise honoured.

Snowflakes

Individual and unique,
each slightly different from its siblings.
Gently gentle.
Softly soft.
Covering all hard edges, dressing the darkness
in flowing gowns of radiant pearlescence,
the snowflakes fall in profound silence.
And the earth slumbers.

Wonder makes a space in the heart for all that makes life worth living.

No, the best place for us is the clearly defined, well-trodden path; it’s safe, known, charted, familiar, dependable….

And yet…

The urge to leave the path behind and roam cross-country is, for me, often utterly irrepressible.  I want to feel the squelch-squerch of bogs underfoot.  I want to move through waist-high swishy grasses.  I want to climb over bolders deposited by glaciers long since melted, rather than take the long way round.

The path may be the easiest way to get from A to Z but it’s no way to imbue your life with the spirit of adventure!  After all, who knows what you might find on your detour.  Some of my most memorable discoveries have been made while taking detours.  A tiny little mossy green frog.  A miniature wild pink primrose no bigger than 0.5cm across.  An abandoned village reclaimed by the forest.  A view that would break your heart open with the sheer beauty of the loch, mountain, sky combination.

The wild spaces help us to recall the wild woman who resides within us all.  She is not inspired, aroused, enlivened by the tame & timid path-followers.  She longs to strike out and away from the safe, the familiar.  She is Little Red Riding Hood gone native – who wandered away from the path and decided she rather liked the freedom she found in the wild secret places of the forest.

She is all of us when we decided that the time has come to be brave, be bold, be adventurous, be ourselves.

At the end of this month my grandparents move out of the house that’s been their home for the last 45 years. It’s a place that’s so familiar to me – a place that has always felt like home. The kind of place that when you walk through the front door, you’re enveloped with that wonderful comforting feeling of belonging.

However, more often than not, as soon as you walk in the front door, you walk through the house and out of the back door, because Grandad would be in his garden – his natural habitat.

He loves that garden. Has spent many many many hours digging over soil, pulling up weeds, trimming fruit trees, tending to the tomatoes. When I picture Grandad in my head, I see him in his garden. It’s from him that I learned the names of flowers, the importance of timing when planting, and the solace one finds in surrounding oneself with nature.

I have such a clear memory from when I was very small, of sitting in Grandad’s greenhouse on an upturned bucket, helping Grandad transplant lobelia seedlings from one polystyrene box to another. These teeny tiny plants were huddled together, cramped up close in the box, all striving for an advantage, for just enough sunlight to grow and be strong – to flourish. Grandad gently gently teased them apart using an old fork, and then placed them in their new box, spaced apart, free to grow, free to thrive.

My own chubby childish fingers struggled to pluck out these baby plants without squishing them. Grandad, however, deftly disentangled miniscule roots and carried them the short distance to their new home. And after a few failed attempts, I too managed to transplant a few seedlings, although my rows were a bit squiffy and my baby plants a bit bedraggled.

I know that even although Grandad is leaving this garden behind, he leaves the soil richer for his attentive actions. He leaves a garden well-cherished.

Grandad is already looking out for his new greenhouse to go in his new garden, where he’ll continue to spend many many many hours transplanting seedlings, tending tomatoes, watering pot plants. And maybe I’ll be fortunate enough to sit with him for a while and transplant lobelia seedlings on some warm spring day…

Last semester at university I taught the wonderful poem The Thought-Fox by Ted Hughes, and I was struck at how incredibly rich natural metaphors can be to describe the human condition.  It’s something that I try and tap into in my own writing, both here at The Calm Space and in my personal creative writing, but to see the act of writing creatively captured and expressed in the form of a fox, I was reminded of the infinite possibilities nature provides us with in order to understand ourselves and our place in the world better.

• The cycles of the moon help us to understand the stages of our life: Daughter, Lover, Mother, Crone, enscribed in the heavens by the new, waxing, full and waning moon.
• The acorn holding within it the plans for a mighty oak illustrates the potential we all hold locked within.
• The mated swans elegantly gliding side-by-side speak of the rich fullness of partnership and romantic love.
• The waves crashing to shore smoothing and eroding the sandstone coast for millenia upon millenia depict the inevitability of impermanence, even to those structures we believe to be implacable in their rigidity.
• The butterfly’s cocoon permits us to believe in the possibility of transformation, emergence, and the sense of coming into one’s own as a fully-realised individual.

Being aware of the natural world as a rich resource for the creation of profound metaphor, we can access it whenever we are faced with existential or moral crisis.  Whether we have lost our direction, whether we are faced with out own mortality, whether we are in conflict with those around us, understanding and a new sense of peace can be found when we immerse ourselves in nature.

What I show in my writing for The Nature Space (hopefully!) is the sheer munificence of nature to provide us with solace, wisdom, transcendence, endurance.  Remaining alert to the environment teaches us such an enormous amount, permitting us to live lives that are full and rich and redolent with joy.

Step outside your door, open your eyes, your heart, your mind, and really see the gifts that nature provides.  The possibilities are, quite literally, endless.

PS Let’s see how many metaphors that take nature as their subject we can create between now and the end of the month.  Leave your contribution in a comment below!

The river itself is accompanied either side by a variety of deciduous trees: willow, oak, sycamore, beech.  And the ivy and the bindweed creepers twist themselves around fences, trunks, and telephone poles.  The water flows fast, rushing perilously headlong down a series of weirs; flows slow in narrowed sections deep, cool, calm; flows in trickles past the feet of heavenhigh bridges where breadth is great and depth is shallow.

Here, the natural world sits cheek by jowl with the urban world, but it becomes easy to feel as though you are walking in the countryside: the sky reaching branches of the beech and the water trailing branches of the willow obscuring the man-made, filtering the light through leafy layers, dappling the pathway ahead.

On my last walk along this rural/urban treasure, my mind tricked itself into believing that I was indeed far from the city – far from the people, the traffic, the high-powered hunger for bigger, faster, better, more.  Instead, I believed myself to be on a journey through the countryside, lulled by the trickle, the rush, the flow of the constantly moving water.

Until I was shocked out of my reverie as I turned a corner and found myself in amongst a memorial service.  The mourners were gathered at one side of a footbridge, and were listening to a eulogy spoken by an elderly gentleman who was standing on the bridge itself.  Each person had a long stemmed yellow rose in their hands.  I hung back not wanting to intrude, just outwith listening distance.

Once the eulogy was over, each took it in turn to climb the few steps onto the bridge and cast their yellow rose into the water.  Soon a trail of yellow blooms were gracefully, gently floating downstream, and the mourners stood and watched as nature reclaimed its own.

This beautifully simple ceremony struck right to the core of my being, as I was reminded of the way we connect with our environment.  That by engaging with our surroundings in a meaningful, meaning-making way, we can create simple, powerful ceremonies – rituals that when conducted with grace and sincerity, resonate with a quiet but insistent vibration.

I walked on, but this time far more aware of the human interaction with this vein of green snaking its way through the city.  I no longer solely saw the lush green allotments, but the hands of many dedicated gardeners.  I no longer saw the parks with white football lines chalked across the green, but the hopes and the enthusiasm of children and the dedication and encouragement of their parents.  I no longer saw the river, its inhuman relentless rush as it excoriated its path through the urban landscape, but the souls that stared into its surface, and the souls that stared back.

The land exists regardless of our presence or not, but by actively engaging with the land, by participating in simple, respectful rituals, we invest the land with our humanity.  And we find that we can create peace, understanding, joy, resonance in ceremonial nature.

I drive my family crazy.

We’ll be out in the car and then, suddenly, I’ll shout the dreaded words, ‘Pull over, pull over pull over!’.  My patient husband does so and I virtually throw myself from the car, run back along the road several metres and there I see it… the most beautiful combination of sky, cloud, sun, horizon.

We’ll be walking from the car park to the theatre for the children’s drama classes, and just as we’re about to cross the road, my family realizes that I’m no longer there.  I’m crouched beside the roadside kerb, gazing at a delicate daisy growing out from a crack in the concrete, it’s very survival belying its apparent fragility.

We’ll be about to sit down for lunch, when my daughter will notice that I’m outside in the garden completely captivated by a rain-drenched spider web.  Its intricate pattern highlighted by the glistening water droplets reflecting the sunbeams that have escaped the rain clouds.

The reason for this is that I’m blessed with the gift of seeing natural beauty.  It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing, beauty stops me in my tracks and I’m incapable of moving forward until my eye has absorbed the detail of a stamen, the shape of a shell, the colour of the changing trees.

The great thing is though, is that this blessing is contagious!  My children all dawdle along now, taking the time to stop and stare.  I can see them connecting with their world, engaging with aesthetics of nature, discovering botanical treasures where others notice nothing at all.

By cultivating this gift, which we all have within us, you not only appreciate the beauty all around you, but you help others to do so as well.

A truly wondrous gift, indeed.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

~Marianne Williamson from A Return to Love~

Rudbeckia Yellow by Amy Palko

Petals the colour of sunset, vivid red, blush pink, burnished orange, turn towards the sun, dance in the breeze, reveling in their own beauty and the experience of being alive in this world.

Extending branches into the arching cerulean blue, the oak tree stands firm, its roots holding the earth in strong grip as it reaches skywards, heavenwards.

Painted by Picasso, the butterfly alights upon the leaf.  The small, delicate insect opens and closes its wings as if readying for flight, resplendent with its splodges of blue, red, black and yellow.

Do you think the flowers, the trees or the insects believe that they should somehow be less than they are?  Do you think they best serve their purpose by living life diminished in some essential way?  Do you think they would celebrate the wonder and the joy and the blessing of life if they chose not to share it with the world?

No.  They would not.

They offer us an example to live by.  An example so profuse that one cannot pretend to ignore it.  Nature’s riotous celebration of life is our reminder to live life to its full potential.

After all, who are you not to?

I walk towards the window to see if I can attribute this change to some outside force, and I am transfixed by a cloud that spans the immediate horizon, blocking out the sun with ominous dark presence.  The last remnants of day are excluded by the blanket of black and I wait for the inevitable.

The rain begins.  The kind of rain that always makes you think that you’ve never seen rain like it before.  Rain, astonishing in its intensity, in its ferocious pounding of the earth, in its fast accumulation in rapidly expanding puddles.  Rain.

I feel intimidated yet fascinated by this demonstration of nature -  it is awe-inspiring.  I feel a sudden compulsion to dash out of the front door and dance on the sodden grass, mud besplattered with my hands raised to the sky.  The downpour running through my hair, drenching every strand, every cell, every fibre of my being, while I laugh and leap and whirl around madly.

But you don’t do that kind of thing in the suburbs.  I stare through the window at the droplet speckled glass, my gaze following the tiny rivulets that flow down the smooth surface.  Adjusting my focus, I look at the windows across the street and notice other figures staring back, staring at the storm, staring at the rain, staring at nature’s intrusion on the calm regulated order of daily ritual.

I begin to wonder if these figures have the same compulsion as me.  To throw caution to the tempest and surrender to the storm.  To feel the cold droplets trace the edges of our flesh.  To inhale that special rain scent as it hits the tarmac, the lawn, the soil.  To abandon that stifling feeling of strict conformity that binds our behaviour to the norm, the acceptable, the expected.  Or is it just me….

I open the window wide and stretch out my hand.  Quickly my arm is covered in a thin film of moisture, glistening in a stray ray of sun that has escaped the heavy sky.  Raising my eyes to the heavens, I see the cessation of the storm.  The brightening of sky, the dissolution of cloud, the clearing of air and the end of the rain.

A missed opportunity.  My heart sinks.  Why didn’t I leave the safe, dry space of the home for the vibrant fertility of the summer squall?  Why didn’t I cast off the shackles of conformity for nature’s sweet embrace?  Why didn’t I risk ridicule to feel my body rocked by the awesome strength of the storm?

Next time, I promise myself.  Next time…

Web 2 by Amy Palko

Lesson 1 – Trusting Yourself

A single silken thread spans the distance between dustbin and windowpane.  The spider responsible depends from a second thread as it plans its web.  Moving from bin to window to sticky silk, an intricate, delicate design materialises thanks to the methodical attentions of the tiny creature.

By morning, the web, this masterpiece of nature, reflects the dawn’s rays in its many dew drops, and it is truly dazzling in its radiant splendour.  Then, before the dew has evaporated in the strengthening sun, the web is demolished as I drag the bin round to the front of the house for its weekly collection.

The spider, undaunted, begins again this time in a new, potentially safer location between windowpane and pebble-dashed wall.  Things may fall apart, but it is always within us to build again and build better.

Lesson 2 – Trusting Your Children

Make a Wish by Amy Palko

The inevitable gust of wind, broken slightly by the long ripening grasses, brushes the cloudlike seedhead and the dandelion lets go…

It lets go of its seeds, trusting its progeny to the will of the zephyrs and the breezes that will carry them far and wide as it disperses with random ease.  The small and seemingly insignificant seeds hitch a ride on the air currents: waltzing over fields and meadows, car parks and supermarkets, farmyards and playgrounds, suburban order and urban hubub.

And then the wind dies down and the seeds settle, finding their place in the world, forming roots, growing strong.

The dandelion, now bereft, maintains its faith in the seeds’ survival and in their ability to thrive no matter where they may find themselves.  By relinquishing control, our children forge their independence and their spirits soar.

Agricultural Patchwork by Amy Palko

Lesson 3 – Trusting Home

The arrival of the feathered, fork-tailed shape against the deep azure blue heralds summer in Scotland.  Every year, I watch for their distinctive silhouettes swooping and diving across a ripening patchwork of crops and listen out for their sweet call.

They enact a ritual yet playful dance of courtship: the two birds flying close and then pulling away, encircling and diverting, diving and soaring.  Flashes of red plumage held in contrast with otherwise dark feathers.

After a summer of productive frivolity in which mates were well met, nests constructed, and young raised, the temperature dips, and signals that it is time to press onwards: onwards to a place where the sun shines and the land resists the cold.

They take to the skies, their cries rising and falling as they climb higher and higher, driven on by an irrepressible urge to fly south for the winter, to leave the winter to those hardier souls whose hearts can resist the icy Arctic blast.

However, the swallow knows he will return.  As it is inscribed in his genetic code to migrate to warmer climes when the land of the north turns white with frost, so it is inscribed that he will fly home when the thaw is complete, the days lengthen and everyone’s attention turns to the changing of the seasons.

On his flight south and his return back north, the swallow never doubts his own ability to find home, or that home will welcome him with its regular familiarity.  Home for us may be a place or a person, a habit or a habitat, but, like the swallow, we must never undermine our trust in ourselves to relocate it, as our inner compass points true north regardless.

Towards the end, my brain buzzed with the effort of containing the theories, methodologies and arguments that underpinned the fabric of my thesis.  Every night I went to sleep still untangling the threads. Through my dreams, I wandered down labyrinthine corridors of thought clutching those same threads tight in my fist, while desperately seeking the exit… only to awake with those knots still stuck tight and the answers eluding my grip.

After four years of working those knots, I began to feel them give beneath the applied pressure of focussed thought.  One final wrench and the knots were undone; the weft of the text arranged, the chapter seams sewn straight, the bibliography hemmed: I was done with the thesis.

It wasn’t done with me though.  My muscles strained still, my shoulders remained hunched, my eyes continued straining to read that which was no longer there.  I felt numb with the effort it took to reach my goal and I felt grief over the absence that achievement left behind.

Waves of Kindness (c) Amy Palko April 2009

In this state, I arrive here, on the shore.  I begin by pacing the strandline searching for shells, pebbles, crab claws, feathers, anything, everything, something.  My mind programmed to seek, to locate, to forage and find, and then test it for use before leaving behind.

After a while, I just stop.

Standing there, on the edge of the water, the rhythmic rock and ripple of salt sea lulls me to a state I have not visited for oh so long a time.  The tension seeps from my bones, my frame relaxes, my vision refocuses, my mind retracts.

Upon that shore, where the sand meets the sea, the waves kiss my fevered thoughts better.  Lapping at the land, these waves of kindness wash my worries away, carrying them out to sea, where the riptide takes hold and pulls them beneath the surface.  The wounds are sluiced clean, and healing can begin.

The kindness I could not give myself, nature gave to me.