The missing piece of the puzzle

Have you ever felt that something is missing?

Never has humanity had to cope with so much information. It comes at us from all sides. The news, television, social media, adverts, gossip. An onslaught of thoughts and we are expected to process so much of it just to function.

We must keep up to date and as knowledge grows exponentially. Education is a lifelong process. Yet we feel as though some essential piece of the puzzle is missing. We are urged to become more productive, better and more evolved by the day, to hack ourselves to become the best we can be, and, in the modern world's modus, to do it now.

The multi-million-dollar self-help industry extols us to heal the damaged goods we have become. Now don't get me wrong. I am not saying any of this does not have its place. It's just that most of it keeps demanding so much from us. We step off the rat race and onto another treadmill with a carrot at the end.

You see most of it engages a part of us we are very used to - the Mind. It doesn't always reconnect us to the part of us that is dying of thirst - the Being. When the Mind is isolated from Being, we become an island, and we live like castaways searching the horizon for the ship that never comes.

The Being is never alone. It is a part of creation, one with the continuum of life. It is nature, extended to boundaries beyond imagination.

We see the natural world around us and, as we observe it through the Mind it is something out there, something we can point at, touch, smell, hear and experience. Through the Mind it is always out there.

Through the Being there are no distinct lines of separation. The Being is an intimate part of it all. The Being finds the idea of separation preposterous. How can the wave be separate from the ocean?

Returning the Mind to the Being restores the balance, restores the missing piece of the puzzle. This is not a logical process; it is an experiential one.

We must each experience this for ourselves, in our own space of Being. Nature helps us to do this. After all it has been an intimate part of our existence for so long. We forgot our connection to nature; it did not forget its connection to us.

Every moment we allow ourselves to connect the Mind to Being with nature activates a natural intelligence that has always been within us. After all, look at our evolutionary history, follow our ancestral tree all the way back to the first life on earth. With ancestry as amazing as that, how could we ever imagine ourselves as something separate from nature?

This “nature” intelligence has always been whispering to us: “Remember who you are, where you come from, what you are a part of”.

We are the wave and the ocean, the wind and the rain, the sunlight on warm rock, the cool loam under the tall tree.

There is nothing in the natural world that is not a part of you and you a part of it. But you must look through the wisdom eyes of Being, not just through the Mind, otherwise you will miss it. All you will see is what is apart from you. That tree will be over there, the wind a burden and the rain something to grumble at.

Occasionally we find our connection with nature when we have time to spend in it. A walk in the woods, an hour in the garden, a night sleeping under the stars. We feel relaxed, uplifted, soothed, reinvigorated. These moments become an antidote to modern living. We know it does us good even though we can't always say why. It is nature's communication with us that is calling us back to ourselves saying: “This is it. This feeling is the beginning of the journey back home, back to who you really are.”