We have been gifted with the presentation of the Emerald Rules. A wonderful addition to our teachings. In the rules there are understandably a few references to “Nature” and our relationship with the Natural World. I daresay, that there may be a few people, perhaps many, who like me have been urban or semi-urban dwellers for most of our lives and I feel that sometimes given our environment, that word “Nature” evokes a rather symbolic set of feelings, So I posit to myself, “what does “Nature” mean in a highly urbanized environment?". I have some suggestions, and I invite readers to supplement these musings. Additionally, most of my life unfolded in a city in the middle latitudes where seasons are very subtle.
One year, I kept a calendar seen things as we swung around the sun:
pelicans showed up off-shore in their migration;
there was a season to the appearance of sand dollars washed up as well as small jellyfish;
in the Fall one sees bird droppings around the base of the telephone poles where small birds have defecated the seed of the pyracantha berries that had ripened;
of course the waxing and waning of the days as marked by the rising and setting through certain buildings;
stop walking randomly (not in the middle of traffic) and opening all the senses
for only a few breaths;
looking at the base of a tree rather than the branches and leaves to sense the depth, the roots, the reality that it rose up from the elements of the planet;
feeling the actuality that birds are swimming in an ocean of gases, just as we walk in that same ocean;
pausing on the aroma of food cooking to follow that aroma back to the farm, back to the bounty of the earth and our legacy;
remembering what Pir Vilayat used to note, that we inhabit bodies that are knit up from the fabric of the earth.
Hopefully, all of these observations are already a part of your practice, I am simply voicing that, and perhaps there are others that people might share.
Yes, there are parks in the cities, but most of our time is elsewhere, and every aspect of our cities come from the bounty of Nature, whether it is wood, steel, or concrete.