Peaceful Inspirations

Lessons from Nature's Guidance

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The Mole and Niche

Highway 1 south of Carmel, California Coast

Standing on the side of the road on a windy, brisk evening watching the sunset and trying to figure out how I was going to get my business going, I looked down next to me, next to the road and saw a little mole digging diligently away. “Boy!” I thought, “what a place to set up a home”. The mole simply kept digging. I thought to myself how nice it would be if I could simply wave my hand and magically create a tunneled home for him. But then I thought “how would I know what he needed or wanted his home to be like? And how does he know where to dig? Actually, the dirt could collapse behind him at any moment and then all of his work would have been for nothing. And such a windy, barren spot for a home.” But then I realized, the mole just does what a mole does. He simply digs his own niche wherever he happens to be. I assumed that for a mole, as long as he was digging, which is what moles are designed to do, he must be ‘happy’ in Being what he is and doing what he was indeed designed to do. It didn’t matter where he dug or how long the hole would last, because the digging was the whole point, not what he was creating.

As I write this, I feel lucky that I know what my ‘digging’ is. It is to Be my true self, no matter where I am or what I am doing. I may be writing this article or my book or singing one of my songs, and although the doing is much less important than the Being, in a sense they are one in the same. When I am writing or singing or teaching Nature-guided therapy, I am simply expressing my Being and in so doing, sharing that expression with others. This is what our lives are all about. As my inner voice put it one day “Your journey is Being.“ And this Being and creatively expressing our true selves, is creating our own niche. It doesn’t matter how or where, just that we allow ourselves to do it.

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Hummingbird, resting for integration, digestion, then able to see higher perspective

Carmel, California

While staying at a friend’s house, enjoying her lovely garden, surrounded by green everywhere and watching the many hummingbirds who frequent the space, I stopped to watch one hummingbird who was sitting on a low branch in a small tree. He must have sat there for at least five to ten minutes. Not only was I surprised to see it resting for such a long time, as I thought hummingbirds were always busy feeding due to their very high metabolism, but it was singing up a storm, and I didn’t realize hummingbirds could make so much noise.

After about five minutes of this little adorable bird chirping away at an almost constant pace, I figured I’d just listen, as if maybe it was ‘talking to me’. The story I heard in my thoughts was that when you have been through intense periods of learning and growth in your life, in a sense feeding lots of new information to your mind, you need to take time to digest it, allowing your whole being, body, mind and spirit, to integrate it into your being and your life. This made perfect sense to me as I had just finished five months of traveling to many natural places, getting tons of stories and information and writing about all that I’d learned. It was no wonder that I was so tired all of a sudden and just felt like resting.

After about five minutes and me ‘listening’ to the hummingbird, it finally went to visit a couple more flowers and then flew up to the top of a larger tree, one in which it could see a much higher and wider view of the entire garden. This was almost as if to show me that when you allow yourself to take the time to rest and integrate what you‘ve learned, only then can you get a better, clearer perspective of what lies ahead.

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Spiders and their innate knowledge of web building

Big Sur river, Pfeiffer State park

Sitting on a huge boulder next to the Big Sur river, watching a little spider on a thin branch. Have never seen this spider species before and never a web quite like this. I almost didn’t see it as it blended into the branch so easily, slimly. I remember from biology class that every spider species has a unique web pattern they weave. I also think how each spider of the same species must weave a slightly different web for itself, and perhaps even each time it weaves a new one, it is even slightly different from the last one it did.

This makes me wonder ‘how does each spider know what web pattern to weave?’ Of course, if each species has a distinct looking web, then each within a particular species must already be ‘programmed’ with the information of how and what pattern to weave. So I guess, the ‘knowing’ is already in them when they are born, sort of maybe programmed in their DNA, so they just know. They don’t ask ‘well how the heck am I going to weave this web I’m seeing in my imagination?’. Since the information is IN them, they just know.

So of course I think, perhaps how to create all of the dreams I have and imaginings of things I’d like to experience are somewhere IN me too. Since every person is unique, maybe we all are born with the ‘program’ in us as to ‘how and what’ to create or express in our lives. We are definitely programmed to automatically breathe in and out, so maybe if we allow ourselves to Be our real selves, not the masked ones our minds have been conditioned to express, maybe perhaps we will see more clearly and simply know like the spider, what is IN us. Then expressing it will come more naturally.

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