TEREZUM

In every morning when I wake up and feel an appetite for a forest bathing I hope to catch a good sunrise. When it happens I feel so energized and amazed by how this small ball of light makes life possible on Earth.

Yesterday I felt a lot of sadness. It was a rough day for me. I felt I needed the forest in order to regain clarity and peace today.

God bless the woman who  woke up so early to make doughnuts at a nearby shop. I bought 3, ate them like they were the best I ever had and rapidly headed towards my peaceful place.

While gulping on those fluffy caloric bombs I saw a truck with live poultry driving on the streets. The stench of death. I wonder if we could do this more ethically. In the past tribes used to pay homage and deep respect to the animals they had to sacrifice. Because without that form of life to feed us we would not have evolved.

Today I feel that there is barbarism and cruelty towards other forms of life inferior to us.  We can’t create life in the lab. The miracle of something being born still eludes us. But the odour of death made such a big contrast with what I ate that I felt the need to write about it.

And in the forest I thought today about the cycle of life. About death. About how we cope with this duality which is part of our existence. Now it is fall. And winter will come. The passing of seasons is literally the death of one landscape and the birth of a new one. A tree needs to lose its leaves and regenerate. Sometimes it needs cutting. Death is inevitable in the natural world and it happens. There is acceptance. The gazelle knows when the end is near and the lion grabs it by the neck. We look at that in horror and sadness yet it is the same act of cruelty which brings us fillet mignon on our plate. Maybe it is even worse in the case of humans as we are not as desperate as a lion in a desert for a meal and we have options while the lion has not.

I also thought about grief. How we feel to mourn for the lost parts of our soul. For someone we loved and lost. For someone we never had. For everything that died in our life. Humans do not accept so easily defeat or pain. We fight it. We resist it. We often cling to one season, blind in front of the need of change. Imagine wanting to be in a perpetual winter just because you love it. After a while you would realize that there was a balance in losing winter instead of holding on to it.

Parts of me die. Parts of me get born. The cells in my body continously go through this cycle, making life possible for me for days in a row. At a deeper level I realize I am alive while things inside me die and get born in seconds. Life contains death and death makes life possible. Just like in the forest, where fallen trees become nutrients for those which still stand tall. I wonder if life is not about the duality of death-life, as much as about the acceptance of both as being part of everything that is alive . And maybe through this acceptance we can let things be as they are without feeling the need for reality to be something else than it just is.