Yuku free message boards

My animal encounter of the day today was with a frog; a big green frog. I had just finished my cucumber, green onion, and tomato salad and had placed the empty bowl on the picnic table where I was sitting. Have you ever noticed how cucumbers taste significantly better out of doors? Anyway, the picnic table was only about 5 feet away from the water. I have taken to eating lunch outside most days and today I happened to dine at the goose ponds. Sitting at a picnic table looking out over a body of water while being serenaded by waterfowl is a really great way to eat. Large doses of the picnic vitamin is restorative, rejuvenative, energizing, and olfactory  and taste bud enhancing. A deficiency of the picnic vitamin is easily cured at a park near by.

So there I was sitting at that picnic table when I look down at the very edge of the water and there is a big ole green frog just sitting there, half submerged in water, its eyes and head above the water. Suddenly, it jumped out of the water. It was briefly startling. It only jumped about two feet but it gave me a chance to see how big it was. It was bigger than any frog I've seen in a very long time. There were very few frogs living way up in the mountains in Colorado and the ones that were there were very small. I'm guessing it was between 5 and 6 inches long.

Being amphibians, frogs live in two worlds; water and land. They remind us that we also live in two dimensions; the dimension of form and the formless dimension. Anyway, I sat there and communed with the frog for some time and then I went for a walk during which I found a hidden path.

As the sky darkened, I walked the path. As usual, my hamster wheel of thoughts came to a halt. As I walked the path, I released all thoughts. I became the observer. I entered the NOW. The thousands of thoughts my noggin is barraged with slowly ceased. I left that mental world and entered the world of nature.

After walking for a while I noticed a sound that stuck out. It was a birdsong that was different from what I had been hearing, both on this walk and over the preceding monhs. I stopped on the trail and as I did so I saw a small cloud of birds fly overhead. They all landed in a small tree by the little creek that flows alongside the trail. Their music drew my attention to that tree. I realized that all those birds were yellow with gray and brown wings and various yellow and brown markings on their heads. Were they some kind of chickadee? Some kind of goldfinch? I didn't really care how they were labeled. What mattered to me was their delightful song  and their playful party attitude.

I stood still on the trail and stared into the tree full of yellow-bellied birds. Everything else disappeared. I entered the NOW and allowed the incredible birdsong to fill me completely. There were at least a dozen of these yellow-bellied birds in that tree. I stood silently listening to them. I may not have fully understood the language but I could feel the vibrations underneath the sound. It was a vibration of pure joy.

It made me think about how pervasive the vibrations of joy are. You can't miss them if you're out in nature--unless, of course, you're totally immersed in thoughts........

I was reminded of how beauty is so profoundly ubiquitous that it is literally impossible to not find beauty in any possible moment. A bunch of yellow-bellied birds can make it obvious but when we're stuck in our thinking it's easy to miss the humongous amounts of beauty going on at all times around us. How many yellow-bellied clouds of birds do we not notice because our focus is not in the NOW? How often do we miss joy because we're not in the NOW; because we're focused either in the past or the future?

Birds can connect us to the NOW. They're very good at it. But, of course, anything can connect us to the NOW. The determining factor is how open we are to it. And even then we must feel it and not just think it. That involves going beyond thought. Thought is the language of this earthly dimension but feelings are the language of the universe. Feelings are the language of gods. Feelings are what connect (or reunite) us with the reality we are creating. They are the pigment we color our reality with.

I stood there for maybe ten minutes watching those yellow-bellied birds. They seemed to be freaking happy. It was like they were challenging me to be as happy. They lived their lives seemingly oblivious to that "man-made" world around them. They seemed to be living in a different world.

I finally continued walking along the trail and as I did so it began to sprinkle. I loved it. I was being annointed.

All the trees alongside the path suddenly became living things who were singing their life stories. Walking down the nature trail I was immersed in countless symphonies; each with a unique story. I could feel that every story led back to some original primal story. There was a song "beneath all the songs." There was a melody that connected me to the flow. Everything in my reality became an indispensible part of the overall picture. Everything I saw, smelled, felt, heard, and tasted became a singular focus. And all those focuses merged into a NOW

I was in and felt a wonderful NOW. It was utterly glorious!

As I kept walking down the nature trail the sprinkling turned rather quickly to rain. It turned even more quickly from a rain into a downpour. I turned around on the nature trail and headed back from where I started. With each passing step the rain intensified. Suddenly there was lightning and thunder. Suddenly, I could no longer hear any birds. All I could hear was the rain pounding down on me. By the time I got back to the car I was sopping wet. The rain was coming down in buckets.

The car has windshield wipers but unfortunately the glasses don't. I started the car and then wiped off my glasses. With clear glasses on, the rain intensified even more. The next thing I knew, being in the car was like being in the inside of a kettle drum. It was like a radio station that came on even though I had the radio turned off. The rain was now coming down in a torrent. I sat there in the car while Mother Nature dumped numerous buckets of water on my reality. The symphony was loud and seemingly unrelenting. It rained and rained and rained.

How do you thank the universe for such a wonderful thing? How do you thank your self for steering you into it? How can you thank nature when you haven't acknowledged her? Nature will show you whatever you need to see. Whatever you need to see is there somewhere in nature. It's always right there in front of your eyes  The question is, Can you see it?

Can you feel it?

When you're walking on the "trail," and it starts raining, how do you react? It's an important question. Please feel free to share.