As a culture, we are largely separated from nature in our climate controlled cars and houses, our sanitary grocery stores and aniseptic offices, our pavement laden trails and double insulated windows. But it is there, nonetheless. Daffodils sprig up from small dirt patches surounded by cement, birds sing outside tenement windows in scraggly bushes as much as they fly among the rolling hills, and hawks sit on telephone poles by roadsides ever watching for their prey.
But our minds are busy and our lives are distracting. We have important plans and internal conversations. We have a need to fix things, recover things; we are constantly reliving the past and scheduling our futures. We have no time to notice small things in nature. We are always running late, talking on cell phones, checking our Blackberies. We are in control, or so we think... But whether we plan it or not, or remember it or not, the moon comes every month with its pearly light and casting shadows to remind us who we are.
I will remember to notice the natural world today, and take pleasure in the coming spring.
