talking to nature

Talking to Nature

Strange, sitting under this old oak tree just looking at the world. It is hot but I am enjoying the shade and I have the place to myself - except there is a fly buzzing round my head and a wasp is inspecting the sandwich I am about to eat. The wasp is supposed to eat the fly!
How many times over the centuries has this spot been enjoyed like this? I wonder where their spirits are now or if they are still here, sitting beside me.
Below is the lake and I can make out people slowly walking round it and nearby there are groups enjoying their picnics. Who wouldn’t on a day like this? It is so beautiful and I love it dearly. Alone I feel part of it all but also separate and it makes me sad. I take it all in - the green fields, the distant farms and the moorland. There is a stillness about me - as if I am locked in an eternal moment and not just on this earth but above me as well in the blue sky and past that wisp of a white cloud towards the eternal universe. I am part of all that too.
The fly buzzes and reminds me of reality so I swat at it. We are in a sad little universe, the wasp, the fly and I. It is not a permanent one and how quickly it might change - especially for the fly.
The wispy cloud is a universe like the big one I can’t see. Never still for a moment, it gathers in tendrils and pushes forwards and spreads out little billows. Soon it might be gone - absorbed into nothing.
Was this peaceful scene really created for my enjoyment - so that I could enjoy it all without fear of being snatched out of life by a predator - like the fly might be or the worm that has just been hauled out of the earth by a blackbird.?
It is strange this sense of violent nature hiding within such a beautiful world. I just can’t put a Creator God at the heart of it. It seems permanent but it is terribly impermanent. One universe? I don’t think so for I have travelled through many. Each love and has created a new universe to live in. Each nearly love could have created others. I loved the ones with radiant souls
Down by the lake the walkers are enjoying their own separate universes and so are the picnickers. Universes are created. They collapse, they implode and sometimes finally explode and disappear just like the little cloud.
Under the tree and watching the wasp, I review my universes. It is like flicking through the pages of a notebook. Where is she and where are those friends? In their own universes and I am here in mine. Three of us and the tree - and all those spirits who have been here before and the ones who are always about - the radiant ones who make me think there must be a god with me in my universe.
tony mcneile