I’m a girl who believes in magic and wander. Most of those close to me feel my way of thinking is a little odd. But from the time I was a little girl, nature spoke to me. Even though I knew Pinocchio was a made up character in a cartoon, I believed that trees could speak. I just stopped telling people that when I realized they started looking at me funny. Part of this imagination I blame my mother. Once she told me they would climb mountains to collect clouds to eat. I was sold by the excitement of the possibilities in nature. Before you dismiss me as high on some strong ass ganja, hear me out.
Writing poetry especially, has been such a great teacher to me. The poetry I write is inspired mostly by experience, stillness and nature. Every time I write a poem inspired by that, it is so beautiful even to me the writer, it takes my breath away each time because of the power of wisdom it holds. My spiritual side vibrates with nature. I can look at a tree and be amazed at how it can be so majestic in its stillness…without doing a single thing visible to the eye. To me trees are the ultimate example of faith. Can you imagine knowing things will always be ok even when you sit still… knowing who you are. Not still in action, but still in an unwavering faith that all is well and you can be majestic by being rooted in your core, no matter what storms in life await you. I have recently been fascinated by Safaris…watching how animals live…finding out how they survive. Every time I learn more about the wild, my heart beats so fast and often times I feel so overwhelmed by the experience and sensations of familiarity in how their own existence mirrors our own…exhilaration in being with the wild and free yet also in a perfectly organized ecosystem…kinda like life. Everything seems so random but being the poet I am, I spot the common patterns that rhyme to the beat of life and realize that when dots are connected, there is nothing random about life. The last safari I went to, I learnt that a lions’ hunting skills are weakened in captivity. If you put them straight into the wild without slowly incorporating them back, they will not survive. They die. And when feeding them, you have to feed them maybe once a week to match the frequency they would probably eat once they go back into the wild otherwise feeding them too much is as good as tearing apart who they are meant to be…wild. The greatest hunters, whether animal or human…are those with the greatest ability to watch, read and understand nature… in the harsh presence of nature.
The wilderness has tough lessons. Its survival of the fittest. The weaker you are, the higher chances there are for you to die. The more challenges you can adapt to, the stronger you get. Now tell me if I’m crazy but are these not valuable life lessons. I learnt about prairie seeds while writing a poem dedicated to my mother, inspired by a time lapse of a blooming flower, and I learnt that they have to undergo harsh conditions for them to crack open and germinate. They literally have to be burnt in order to live, survive and grow. In my 34years of life, one thing iv learnt without a shadow of doubt is that challenges and hard times literally build character…you are cut from a different cloth especially when you survive them. Without them we cant grow…we cant learn and we cant evolve. The most influential people in the world have overcome gruesome adversity. Once you can withstand the heat of the moment and pass the phase, the person you become is unstoppable.
I could go on and on about the wisdom I see in nature but I think you get my point. In as advance as we are as human beings, we are petty compared to the technology in nature. If only we are aware of it… watch it and learn. It would have shown us how to survive in life, way before we have to learn and experience the lesson ourselves. The answers are all around us…in nature and in as much as we see ourselves as superior to it, we are part of it…made from the same DNA. The more we feel we have nothing to learn from it, the more we have to endure the pain of learning lessons and things that we already have a manual to. This post was inspired by a documentary I just watched by David Attenborough: A life on our planet. I couldn’t sleep afterwards. It bothered me so much. It is definitely worth watching. I was appalled by how we have…I have become so greedy as a human being. A greed that is slowly killing us as much as its killing the rest of the planet. I would be the first one to admit that in as much as I profess a love for nature, I have quickly dismissed how close to home the plight of the dismal destruction of nature is to me. Global warming always seems like a distant problem and not to sound racist, the fight for rainforests and animals’ extinction sounded like a white peoples’ problem…definitely a racists shallow notion. Watching that documentary was tear jerking for me and I know I have to start making better choices. Sometimes I wonder if this Covid 19 pandemic is mother natures’ way of reminding us how we are so interconnected as a world, how small we really are and have no control over everything, how we have abused our power and how something that affects animals has the power to wipe us out as a species. How if we are not careful, we can be extinct like the dinosaurs that were causing mass destruction to the world and we the modern day dinosaur may cause mother nature to choose to save the earth from the most destructive species there is to the rest, human beings… due to our over indulgence, indifference and greed. Our entire species is in danger and…ignorant us, thinks its the poor animals that have got it bad.
Lets do better.
Maggie's diary 