Santa Clara Meditation Column – Like Wild Flowers Whose Name We Don’t Know…
The world is truly a beautiful place, a gift from God to human beings. Whenever we are stuck in some meaningless affairs, burdened and stressed, unable to find answers from within, we start to orient our view towards looking outside of ourselves and looking at nature. When you really reflect, you can see how nature gives us everything, how it is silently living just as it is, and we can appreciate the fact that we are constantly surrounded by divine nature. What would it be like if we could live in nature, as part of nature?
We live in pursuit of happiness. Maybe that’s why we live here in this world. But not many people, actually very few people perceive themselves to be happy individuals. The others just live hoping to become happy. Well, the world must have originally been a happy place. Then, why aren’t we living happily like other creatures in the world?
The problem is that since childhood, we have stored all that happened in our lives in our minds. What we experienced became our “selves”. We identify ourselves with the ‘pictures’ we have stored within our minds: ‘I’m a person who has a rigid point of view.’ ‘I’ve never been happy in my life’ ‘I’m very stressed out’ ‘I’m hopeless in this life’ so on and so forth… We have constructed our ‘false’ identities and work so hard to try and fit into these ‘unoriginal’ definitions of ourselves. That’s probably the reason why we can’t live just as we are. As this conception of “me” becomes more and more fixed, we are more deeply captured in our own minds. How burdensome is it to live in your own mind world. It’s undoubtedly suffocating you.
Look at the flowers that we cannot identify, that we don’t even know the names of. They just live as they are. They just live as part of the world following nature’s flow, without trying to identify themselves. Wouldn’t it be so liberating to live like such flowers? Maybe that’s the way we, humans, have to live too. Then, we will just live accepting and embracing what’s around us; we will live just as we are. By cleansing the mind, by throwing away the false identity you have built within yourself, you will recognize the true value of your life and your life will be full of a hopefulness and happiness that you only dreamed about.
