Why Nature is My Guru

Photo by Seaq68 on pixabay

Nature can teach us many things about life and ourselves. It is a teacher if we’re willing to listen, but this post isn’t about how Nature can be our teacher. It’s my story of how Nature became my guru.

In order for a guru/student relationship to work, there must be love. From an early age I felt as though I was safe in Nature. I trusted Its presence. I loved being surrounded by It and felt loved by It.

My first sense of the spiritual was in Nature and not in a church though visiting Sainte Anne de Beaupré in Quebec City as a child brought me to a higher order of spiritual feeling. It was those early ventures into the woods that first captured my spiritual imagination. It wasn’t the awe I felt in the cathedral but a quiet, peaceful feeling. Nature embraced me and I embraced It.

I was I very sensitive child. The noise of the playground was a bit much sometimes. The woods behind the school yard provided solace and even healing. I felt alone in a crowd but the crowded forest of trees and rocks and birds felt like one being holding me. There was no noise, only soft whispers of wind and birdsong. The solid boulder, rough with lichen upon which I sat grounded me. These woods were a peaceful sanctuary and the Being all around me was a greater teacher than those in the school.

For me Nature is so full of the Presence of Being, but as I got older, I paid less and less attention to Its love and teachings. In my late 20s I discovered Paganism, and made an attempt to listen and bring Nature into my life again. It was touch and go and I never really reached that deep relationship I once had as a child.

About 10 years ago, in my late 30s I began to bring Nature back into my life in a more visceral way. My husband and I acquired a mountain cabin in Green Valley Lake. I spent time walking in the woods behind the cabins across from us. For the first time since I was a child I began to relax into Nature’s Presence. I had grown somewhat fearful of being out in the woods because it had been years since I spent any time in a forest or with Nature at all except a little time in a park now and then.

I walked and got to know this particular land. I opened to it and it opened to me. But then the fire came and burned much of it. It was too painful to spend time there anymore. Nature receded to the background of my awareness again.

Lately I am a watcher in the window rather than a walker in the woods. Seeing the trees sway in the wind outside my office window does feed my soul to some degree, but I’ve lost touch with Nature’s heart. This blog is an attempt to bring my awareness back to Nature and regain the connection I felt as a child.

Nature is our greatest teacher. We need only to pay attention to Its rhythms as they express in the cycles of sun, moon, trees, plants, animals and our bodies.

We are Nature just as we are Spirit. I am earth, water, fire and the air that passes through me. I am clay, my blood a river, my heart the fire and I am inspired by the air I breathe.

Nature is my guru. It teaches me through all I do and experience. And when I am tired, it holds me and lets me know I am not alone. It will always hold me. Even as I transform, I will eventually leave behind what is Nature’s, my body. Even as I become identified with my soul, I will also become the wind in the trees and the soil that brings forth new life. I and Nature will always be together in the One Spirit that is all.