Change can be hard or easy. You probably know this already. Hard change argues with every step to resist, to stay the same. Easy change is when you enjoy it, like receiving a fun gift that changes some part of your life.
The move to Low Footprint Living is like that. The gift you receive is the constant supply of all that you need to sustain life, ever-present and free of charge. Turns out that supply was always already there, and still is here now. The same is true for everyone.
These are the gifts that Nature supplies, from air to water, gravity to sunlight, plants and animals, and the amazing gift of your body. Gratitude seems the only reasonable response, with a large side-order of knee-wobbling awe.
Once you see them for what they are, it is easy to be grateful for such things. Even joyful! If you are reading this you are likely among the wealthiest and luckiest people ever born. There is plenty to be joyful about, if you choose to make it a habit to look.
We generally don’t harm what we are truly thankful for.
We sometimes hurt the ones we love in moments when love is not present in our words or actions, when it’s all about our blame or frustration or whatever. We all do it. We all have parts of us that have not yet grown up.
When I remember our love and pause and look again through the eyes of my heart, my beloved stands invariably moist eyed and waiting for me to get over myself.
So it is with the gifts of Nature.
Deciding to be grateful for Nature is a personal decision, made in a private moment in the deep interior of your being. Your relationship with Nature is yours alone, and only you can make the effort to grow and deepen it in your everyday life.
It is a trick of ego to get busy fixing other people when our own house is not in order. Evangelical insistence that others do as we do is rarely successful and often annoying, and can take the fun out of the good work we do for ourselves.
There is no more powerful way to to inspire others to change than to embody what you want in your own life … because you just love to live your life in that way.
If you take a moment to pause and look closely into the depths of living things, there are plenty of reasons to be grateful for the natural world…
- She made and gifted you with your body
- She maintains conditions that keep us alive
- She provides habitat for all the other living things on which we depend for our food.
- Her beauty is the nourishment upon which a healthy soul must feed
What is not to be thankful for?
Then there are plants. All of our food ultimately depends on plants. As does our breathable air and drinkable water. To be grateful to the plant world is to remember how much we depend upon it for our existence in every moment.
Ask a gardener how much they love their plants and you may be surprised at how deep their feelings go. As every gardener knows at some level, tending to the lives of plants is good for the soul. Plants do not tell us directly what they need to survive, only in whispers in the language of a caring heart.
To tune in to plants is to exercise our connection with the world that made and supports us, often distinctly sacred in nature.
Nature is feminine. She gives birth to all life, then provides for them what they need to survive. She is generous and accepting, and has a squillion things happening all at once and somehow it all manages to come together.
She is also wild and occasionally furious, destructive and ruthless. She gives life, and in the end, takes it back. We are here at her discretion, and like the archetypal feminine, her power is both fearsome and wonderful at once.
Regardless of the destruction she sometimes wreaks on the world, her gifts of life, sustenance and beauty are so profound as to be awe-inspiring. She is Mother Nature, and deserving of sincere gratitude.
Learning to be thankful for all the gifts of Nature is about learning to take notice, to pay attention and be more aware of the simple facts about the ways we depend on air, water, food, sunlight and gravity to survive.
The more you notice, the more grateful you become.
Concrete Steps You Can Take Now
What you eat and drink is a great place to start, because you do it every day multiple times. Try going organic. Drink more water. If you’re buying anything in a packet, check the ingredients and see if you want someone you love to be ingesting whatever chemicals are to be found there. Being kind to yourself is the first step to being kinder to your world.
If you live in a man-made world of concrete, glass, paving and painted walls, you may find it useful to bring some natural objects into your world. House-plants work a treat, as does cooking with fresh ingredients. Regular visits to natural places can be like water in the desert to a thirsty soul.
A garden in your yard, or a planter box in your lounge room, may be the soil out of which heart-opening magic will grow.
For body-types, grounding a grateful perspective into your embodied experience is all-important, otherwise it’s just a thought without any reality attached.
You know when it’s grounded because of how it feels in your heart… as if your chest is opening and expanding a little to hold the gratitude you feel there. Gratitude can also commonly be found in the sound of a deep sigh and the moistening of eyes when beauty appears.
If you’re more of a heady type, it may appear as awe, where the mind falls silent and a bit wobbly on its knees from the mystery and miracle of the simple inter-connected beauty of nature.
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