Joseph Campbell tells the story of how a Zen master stood up before his students to deliver a sermon. Just as he was about to open his mouth, a bird sang. The Zen master proclaimed, "The sermon has been delivered." Nature is a natural teacher. All you need is to read its sacred scripture. A student had neither harmony with nature nor any idea what he could learn from this master. What a great teacher nature is, if one can participate in it. But the student was just an observer, and a contentious one at that.
In nature, the observer remains an outsider. Hidden from nature, he can neither locate himself nor be located. The participant, by contrast, situated within nature, finds himself and is found, even if he is hidden in it.
Throughout history people of different cultures and religions have gravitated to their respective sites of power and beauty, such as the river Ganges (India), the Western Wall (Jerusalem), the Temple at Delphi (Greece), and St. Peter's Basilica (Rome), in order to seek personal transformation. Yet nature itself is the ultimate transformer. As Wendell Berry says, "Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine-which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes."
In nature we are confronted everywhere, even in a simple garden, with wonders-but we have to seek divinity within them. In their book Spiritual Literacy, Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat advise us to spend time in a flower garden. But we are to make sure that our visit is long enough to take in the various charms provided by the universe of blossoms, stems, and petals. Whatever way we choose to spend our time, we should be aware that we are gracious guests in someone else's home-nature's abode-so we must act accordingly.
We should be bathed by the rays and feel the way flowers must feel as the sun shines on them. We should gaze at the great beauty and variety of blooms, their diverse shapes and colors, and the way each is different yet part of the world of flowers. We should use all our senses, hearing the sounds of blossoms in the breeze, and smelling the fragrance of the flowers, separately and together, and experience the garden's vulnerability and its infinity. If you really touch one flower, you touch the whole world, say the Sufis.
As Scott Russell Sanders says in his book Staying Put, one's spiritual center is also a geographical one: one cannot live a grounded life without being grounded in a place. By belonging to a landscape, one feels a rightness, an at-homeness, a knitting of self and world. This sense of clarity and focus, of being fully present, is likened to what in Buddhism is called mindfulness, what Christian contemplatives refer to as recollection, and what Quakers call centering down.
Whether at Stonehenge or in a field of flowers, human beings need to find a place to commune with nature in order to be grounded, so that we can afford to launch a spiritual pilgrimage. It is only by becoming a part of the sacredness of nature that one may unearth his spiritual self. It is there waiting for the transformation.
T. Byram Karasu, M.D. is the author of, The Art of Serenity
