Nature is such an amazing teacher! I often find myself watching nature and being open to the experiences, as the close, non-attached observations can be applied to our lives on the micro- and macrocosm. It fascinates me that even the hummingbird has developed a way to conserve energy! We have a lot to learn from hummingbirds. One of them is that no being can constantly keep a fast pace without adequate time for rest. And yet, we seem to expect that of ourselves in the human world we live in.

Happiness is something that our culture seems to want to attain. There’s even an unconcsious messaging that we can actually buy happiness. Again, happiness is a feeling. It’s a 90-second, fleeting feeling that we cannot hold onto. Bur what we might actually be looking for is a state of being. The state of contentment, for example, is being in the present without worry or restlessness. That state is a practice and means we must come back to it over and over, as there is no perfecting it. Here, we can allow feelings to pass through our experience as we practice returing to the baseline state of contentment. In any event, our brain (the three pound ball of tofu in our skulls) likes to know what’s happening so it can survive. But at this moment in time, we just aren’t able to do that.