Father Nature Lives Here.

We’ve been driving through southern Colorado and New Mexico for the past week. The terrain out here is rugged. The weather extreme (80’s in the day; 40’s at night). Vast, wide open spaces. Huge rock formations. Uniformity in scenery and then, around the corner, an entirely new landscape.

Father Nature lives here: vast, rugged, sparse. His scale is nothing like I’ve experienced, being from and living on the East Coast. There is a sense of being very small—a right-sizing of human ego and concerns. Nature rules here. There is no way around it. Use the elements, live by their rhythm and their rules, or perish.

I am awed.

But I do not feel nurtured or nourished, like I do by the lush humidity of Mother Nature in the East. I feel exposed, ill-equipped for an extended stay, as if I lack the requisite rugged individualism the landscape demands.

Still, the landscape, the adventure is carving away at me: it has shifted my perspective two core experiences that have shaped me, opening up new insight into the nature of my Self, and Self and the human experience in general.

These are questions I did not consciously ask. Answers I did not consciously seek. I am tired. I am consumed by the logistics of travel and the phenomenon around me. I am not contemplative (at least not in a way I recognize). But there it is, Nature and Experience, sheering away at me, shifting things around.

My Teacher has always said, Use Everything. Use every experience of your life for your own transformation, your own freedom.

This I am experiencing as Everything Using Me, as laying myself wide open to its Wisdom and its Impact, as Nature and Experience transforming me without me setting any intention has to how or why. I am simply observing, and trying to get out of the way.