Yah everyone, time for another round of LMB. Today, the nature edition. Almost all of my moments of beauty are moments in nature. Someone told me recently about asking a group of people about their closest religious/spiritual/deity connection moment, and for almost everyone, it was a moment in nature. That's no surprise to me, as an eco-buddhist. And I've been well-privileged to have had a number of beautiful moments in nature recently. I am storing them up like a squirrel does nuts for the inevitable winter.
But how about you? What was your last most beautiful moment in nature?
I camped out on the Potomac last weekend, swam and canoed and explored, cooked steaks and corn and yams over the fire, woke through the night to watch the moon and stars move by, listening to the river. As much as I enjoy hiking and climbing and kayaking, I find I'm spending more and more time in nature just sitting. It takes time to really experience a place, and I find that the more time I spend sitting in one place, the more I learn and experience. There are places that I've been visitting for over a decade, through the seasons, droughts and storms and everything in between, and I have new or deeper experiences and insights each time.
This time, I was sitting in what's probably a narrow river "scour prairie" - a sloped sandy bank below the floodline, that goes lush in the late summer, and is swept clean by each flood. I'd been watching wasps seethe through a dense of flowering plants, impressed by the diversity, learning their patterns, when I noticed the flash of a blue-tailed skink.
I love skinks, just starting by the name. These are often called 5-lined skinks, but I call them blue-tailed Because They Have Blue Tails. The tails darken with age, but the young have tails that are wierdly bright, an electric ultramarine blue that seems to be just on the cusp of visible. This was a recently-hatched skink, tiny, under 3 inches. He'd been cautious enough at the beginning, but forgot about my disturbance after about 10 minutes, and started flick-exploring the rocks and pebbles a meter in front of me.
Older skinks have more caution, and even a slight movement by me can send them into hiding, but this one was more complacent. I practiced my soft focus - most beings will notice a human stare: we are predators, with big eyes. The skink slinked around, exploring, and then started flicking it's tail back and forth, mesmerizing curves, then tensed and pounced on a tiny fly, caught it in it's mouth, worked to swallow it.
I felt privileged to have shared the moment, felt the satisfaction of the skink's feast. In some ways, I knew more about this skink's habitat than it did - I knew it was on on island, had explored the boundaries, knew what grew where, and what happened when. But this skink was so much better connected to this place, was likely several hundred or thousand generations descended, knew instinctively how to live in this place that I would only ever be a visitor to. I was jealous.
So how about you - what was your last most beautiful moment in nature?