Thanks to the coots..

I’ve never been naive enough (in my adult life) to believe that nature, my greatest love, is all sweetness and light. 

But there’s a difference between knowing the truth of something, and very viscerally witnessing it in front of your eyes. 

This has been an emotional week for me, as a result of experiencing the deeply harsh cruelty of the fight for survival. Ironically this came a day after I was giddily celebrating the arrival of ‘my’ local swan babies - eight beautiful, perfect cygnets. 

I was unfortunate to be there watching them as a nasty encounter occurred between the male swan and a pair of Canada geese, with their equally adorable baby goslings. 

While knowing it was ‘just nature’, I felt helpless and terrified on behalf of the geese and their tiny babies, and I won’t spell out the full upsetting details. But I was taken aback by just how shaken I was, and it triggered a much deeper feeling of sadness knowing I’d witnessed the darker truth that lies behind everything around us. 

In the yoga world, the Buddha’s quote ‘Life is suffering’ is well known and often discussed but wow, this really hit me this week. Maybe I’m very privileged to have lived my life thus far without severe trauma, (though I say this as someone who lives with regular bouts of depression), but I’d never really ‘got’ or resonated with the sweeping enormity of ’life is suffering’ before. 

These last days, I’ve felt a strong primal connection to the simple fact that life is all about suffering and survival (I promise there’s some positivity coming later..). And generally, perhaps for our own sanity and protection, we deny this. We push it aside and don’t allow ourselves to really fully SEE - the survival of one baby depends on the cruel death of another, the inhumane farming of innocents gives us our choice of food, one privileged child lives a life of luxury and ease, another begs on the street, our constant desire for lovely, shiny new ‘stuff’ and the modern society of our choosing slowly destroys our very home, Earth… 

It’s natural we should want to avoid facing the absolute sadness of this head-on, each and every day, and I believe to a degree it must be an instinctive self-protection. 

As part of my yoga practice these days, I’ve been working with really sitting with, and fully allowing the experience of my emotions. Not pushing them aside, not distracting myself with something, but sitting with the feeling, being ‘in’ it. Letting it be ok to feel, in the physical body, the sensations of my emotions and not giving in to judgment or any voices in my head telling me to get over it, or asking me why I’m so upset over something so ‘trivial’. 

And this has helped, freeing the emotion, instead of keeping it knotted up and causing more tension than necessary. I’ve let myself cry knowing the body’s wisdom is guiding me to release the emotion, not cling on to it. 

And those who’ve been to my classes this week may have noticed an emphasis on this - being with the feelings, noticing the physical manifestation of our emotion. Something we’ve become very distanced from as a society. 

So, to the positive?..!

I took a walk this morning along a different stretch of the river, as always trying to be fully present and immersed in what was around me. And I saw three different pairs of coots, not usually my favourite water bird, but I viewed them differently today. There’s one particular pair who have had their nest destroyed and eggs lost at least three, maybe four times - change in water levels, herons, the ‘claw’ machine that cleans the water, etc. 

But they don’t stop. They never give up. They tirelessly keep at it, building and rebuilding and trying again, urged on by the deep need to continue, to survive. 

I found tears falling as I watched this plucky pair of determined little birds, who were not giving up on life. As that’s what it would mean, if we allowed ourself to fall to the darkness, to see only the suffering. Giving up, stopping life?

Life is suffering. And survival. AND.. Finding the JOY in between that brings us meaning. 

How could we stop when there’s the sight of a dandelion head ‘clock’ in the sunlight? The fresh, lemony scent of newly-opened elderflower blossom, the beauty of a fluttering powder blue butterfly in the nettles, the flash of a dragonfly’s jaw dropping iridescence?

And the knowledge of new, not yet learnt delights and experiences within nature which surely lie ahead. 

Maybe nature is not your thing.. (though I’d say that’s like saying ‘I don’t like life’, but no judgement here..!) But can you find equally small, and yet HUGE joys in the little moments, in whatever brings you a connection to the meaning and joy of being here. Speaking to someone you love on the phone, spending time with those most precious to you, the taste of your favourite foods, the sound of your favourite song..

Knowing that there can be no beauty without pain, no joy without suffering shouldn’t be a reason to despair, but instead inspiration to seize onto those moments of bliss, of calm, of perfection, of wonder, and cherish their deep, true value.