Coming Back From Nature

After ten days in Yellowstone and Great Tetons National Parks, and seeing and experiencing nature, wildlife and dirt, it shocks me how easy it is to disassociate myself from that experience. Back to traffic, back to bad air, and back to rushing to gain one minute of free time. Yet, it seems that the majority of us humans are moving into cities. Why is it?

Only a few days ago I was admiring bald eagles and elk, and watching men and women indulge in a quiet moment of... fly fishing over emerald-looking waters.

How can we live an existence of concrete, asphalt and recurrent urgencies?

Letters to a Young Poet

"… I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon. If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which staggers behind, marveling, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to LIVE everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer…"

By Rainer Maria Rilke
from Letter 4 of Letters to a Young Poet