I don't do yoga!

Someone said to me the other day: “You must spend a lot of time sitting looking at nature.” I guess I do. I guess when I think about it my blog is crammed full of birds, hares, butterflies, lambs, frogs and flowers! She’s right - I love to look at ‘nature’!

Why? Why do we do that? For me, it’s relaxing: balm for the soul, as the phrase goes. I love to just sit. “Sometimes I sits and thinks; sometimes I just sits”, my mum used to say. I don’t do yoga, but I do meditate and I love to do it out of doors. Life is busy. The city where I live is noisy, achievement-orientated, dusty and dirty and, although it’s vibrant and stimulating sometimes, it’s also exhausting. My garden is a haven. Right now it’s a mini ‘Keukenhof’ (that famous Dutch garden) – full of tulips, narcissus and grape hyacinth. Red, yellow and blue – primary colours. It’s not subtle, but it’s bold and beautiful. Even in April the birds and butterflies love it, and so do I. Out in the countryside it gets even better and I can stop on a walk and watch hares racing across the fields or crested grebe bobbing up and down on the canal in their annual mating ritual. It’s all around us when we stop and look.

Why is nature so restful and relaxing? I guess it’s so at peace with itself. It just ‘is’. Nature doesn’t struggle or strive. A friend of ours said “you never see an apple tree straining to produce apples”. They just come, regular as clockwork, every year. It’s an intrinsic part of the tree’s ‘apple-ness’. It will never produce pears (without some very smart, human intervention). Life can be such hard work for us humans. We need to achieve – and be seen to achieve – such a lot. So sometimes a long hard look at nature can be so refreshing.

“Consider the lilies, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin. But I tell you, Solomon in all his glory did not clothe himself like one of these”.* The Bible puts it very picturesquely but maybe if we stare long enough at nature and meditate on it, some of that natural radiance will rub off and we can stop rushing around so fast and lay back a bit – stop thinking and just sit, like the lilies!

*Luke’s gospel: chapter 12, verse 27