Innerwealth - Nature's Universal Law
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Real, Straight Talking, Honest approach to Personal Growth.
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As a child, nature was my best and only friend. After my mother died, dad couldn’t deal with the continual reminders of her passing so we le ft our home town, our memories (at least the physical ones) and moved to the dusty Australian outback to wn of Mildura. How my father found the place on the map is beyond me. Suffice to say, I spent th e next three years sitting in dust, playing with my toys, throwing stones at passing cars and burning down the backyard garage.
Around the corner, there were a bunch of old willow trees. Under those trees the Aboriginal people would sit to shelter from the sun. These were hard working people who picked fruit in the blazing heat for a small income. I’d often go there and sit with them. Big, fat women with huge breasts. They’d just sit there, sometimes laughing, sometimes making a comment, but they didn’t talk much. It was just not there way. I felt comfortable with my aboriginal friends; they didn’t talk much, so they didn’t expect much. I felt strangely loved in the heat of the wind and the company of those beautiful old women.
Dad eventually married the housekeeper, a contract made out of desperation. He had three children under 10, a business to run, grief to deal with and in that dusty town, there were few other choices. My soon to be stepmother, Helen, threatened, “Marry me or I go”, entering our lives through the strangest of circumstances. She was Irish and had a daughter from a husband who’d died in a motorbike accident. She was the complete opposite to my Aboriginal friends. She never stopped talking and I never felt welcome, never once felt loved. It’s strange that a group of women who never spoke to me, made me feel loved, while the one that never shut up, made me feel rejected. Even her, “I love you” speeches felt rotten to the core. I am ashamed to admit it, but there were many times that I wished her husband had never died, or she’d been with him on that bike.
Helen was an alcoholic. A mad alcoholic. When she was sober she was great. When she was drunk, well, there was nothing she wouldn’t do. And where love was missing, violence was not. She’d hit me so hard across the face I’d go down unconscious. The strange thing is I loved Helen and I think, in a really weird way, it was because of something learned from the Aboriginal people - “Doesn’t matter what you say or do, you’re ok”.
Sometimes I’d lie in bed thinking of my birth mother. I call it thinking now, but really, there was no thought. I’d just lie there at night with her. There were no words or sounds but we talked, not with our mouths, but with our hearts. In the silence and stillness of those nights, I was never alone. But my Dad was. He ached and grieved, he worked day and night. His heart was shattered and I knew he couldn’t talk to Mum at night. He was just to busy, and probably too afraid, to speak to her ever again. The pain would be too much.
There’s another world out there, a quiet one, where words are not necessary, where books and spelling tests are of no real importance. A world where how much money you have or how you earn it just doesn’t matter. It’s a world you know when you sit around a camp fire at night staring into the flames, chilled from the night air, and everyone falls silent.
Since my childhood this world of Nature has been a great friend. In that world there is another knowledge, a knowledge I feel in my bones, I know it, but there is nothing to know. I know people, but nothing about them that they think is important. There is light and dark, strong and weak, but there is no relativity. Nothing is good or bad, better or worse, it just is what it is.
I call it love, but I don’t know what it is. I’ve tried to describe it, but that’s impossible. I’ve called it emptiness, but I’m never empty when I am there. I’ve called it stillness, but I am never still when I am there. I’ve read about soul, but that isn’t it. I’ve read about God, it is not that either. Nature is stillness …another world.
I do not have to go anywhere to find nature, it is within me. I lose the connection sometimes when I am stressed or in a rush or ambitious or greedy. But all I have to do is to stop all that, and it’s there.
There are no secrets in nature, the laws of nature are universal.
To force myself into this space is impossible. I have tried. I studied Zen and Yoga but these were not my way. My way is nature because it is in nature I know my roots. In nature I stop thinking, doing, trying, knowing, wanting, asking and needing. In nature, it just is. I discovered my intuition deep inside this empty space I call it stillness. In nature I hear without hearing, see without seeing. There is an awareness that comes almost as if I were being fed information.
Over the past years I have taught this connection to nature to many people. I have built yoga schools, run retreats, taken almost 40 groups to the Himalayas of Nepal. I have come to appreciate that what was a great gift to me in my childhood, is not necessarily so simple for others. At first I lacked a lot of compassion for people who couldn’t find this reconnection to nature, but over time I’ve come to see that it is not easy.
I think the perfect way to teach these laws of nature is to help people experience them. When I take people to Nepal we chat about all manner of things, but we are just killing time until they find that inspiration that comes from nature. People are afraid of this connection because they feel “out of control.” When I went to Santa Fe, New Mexico in the US in search of a medicine man, I had no idea what to expect. I had been in New York selling my poetry books to make the rent and woke one morning with an address and an urgent need to go meet this man. After travelling for days, we met. He sat me down on the sand, opened his leather briefcase and took out a claw, a scull, feathers and some cloth. He never spoke. But we connected in another world and I remembered my aboriginal friends by the river bank. So much of life happens without words, we are just not sophisticated in that science yet,but we're learning.
On my first trip to Nepal I was snowed into a lodge with my leg was swollen and painful. Alone and fearful, I huddled by the small copper stove. A man came up behind me and placed his hand on my shoulder. I didn’t look around, I couldn’t. He stayed there for what seemed like half an hour, then turned and left. He was a monk and we connected. He healed me and probably saved my life. It was an amazing feeling, probably pure love. Again, nature that created the body, healing the body.
Over these past 40 years of my journey, I have connected with many amazing people. Most of those people said few words. There was no need. They too live in this “other world” where there is no attachment, no language, no time. Nature.
You might think this space is lonely, but I am never alone. The spirit of earth, animals and special people exists in stillness. Here there are no walls, no boundaries, nothing to possess, nothing to gain and nothing to lose.
In the empty space where the ego is not, there is silence. I have come to call this place love. Nothing can leave this love. Nothing can enter it. I have no control over it, nor it over me.