The following is what I wrote to myself in reply. Coming across it again this morning, I read it and again felt comforted, so I thought I'd share.
The entry in my journal began with this quote:
"You can tell that it's an aspen tree because of the way it is."
The magical thing about nature--apart from its beauty and resiliency--is the fact that it exists. It is. We did not make it, we did not begin it, though we often shape it, guide it, and ask much of it. It exists, it has existed, it will exist.
When the political and economic climate are chaos and stress, when NPR has an endless selection of interviews from war-torn, poverty-stricken nations, when the business of making coffee is stressful, when the car needs to be cleaned and the dishes are piling up...still nature is.
These trees that have stood for twenty, fifty years, are standing. These hills, pushed up from the earth millennia ago, are unmoved, steady.
The earth rotates, the seasons change, the moon follows its course. The sun sits: a star in a vast universe, having found an unsolicited fan-base, whose predecessors left the very fabric of life. And people come and go. Tragedies, triumphs, settlements, wars; epochs of great hope, epochs of great fear.
All the while, the earth spins, and nature speaks to us truth: there is existence beyond your existence, many things carry on but nothing stays forever, every tide that rises falls, forest fires are essential, every living thing needs every other living thing.
Every spring, no matter who is president or who is at war, the birds will make their nests and prepare for new life.
Every winter, no matter what victories have been won or ground gained, the leaves will fall, the flowers will cease to bloom.
"All will be well" is the message of the wind in the leaves, the message the birds chirp and the squirrels hide away; the message of buzzing bees and lines of ants. Falling leaves, fallen trees now hosting a new kind of life, lizards playing in dying grass and new trees sprouting wherever they choose, for no particular reason; mosquitos biting lawyer and beggar, pesky equally to all they encounter. The cool breeze kind to all who stand in it, the eclipse amazing to all who watch it.
Nature is, has been, will be.
Sit in a park and watch the insects for a while. Notice how they don't care about your quarter-life crisis, notice how unmoved they are by your break-up, your promotion. Notice how the fly buzzes in your face even though your hair looks great and some good looking guy smiled at you.
And then breathe deep. And notice how the invisible movements around you sustain your very life. How the trees breathe out the very air that you need to breathe in, and are fed by every exhale of every human and animal. Notice how the earth holds you--strong enough that you will not float away, light enough that you can run, dance, jump. Notice how even in the shade the sun nourishes you, how even in the waste the ground nourishes the trees.
Imperceptibly, water is evaporating into the air, working its way to the atmosphere, to form clouds, to rain down whenever it has gathered to bursting, in an ecological global redistribution of resources.
You exist because all of this around you exists, you cannot exist apart from it, though it exists apart from you.
This air you breathe has been breathed for generations, and will be breathed for generations after you are gone.
May we find peace in knowing that whatever spheres we move in, whatever small worlds we depend on or depend on us, whatever it is we hope for or fear, all of this envelopes all of that.
Lay on a patch of ground, feel the weight of your body against the mass of the earth, feel the security that lies in the history of this place.
Everything will be okay.
Everything will be.
