Autorentext

Mary Summer Rain has written more than twenty books, including Earthway and Beyond Earthway, and was featured on the NBC television special Ancient Prophecies. Together her books have sold more than one million copies worldwide. She lives in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

Klappentext

From the bestselling author of Earthway comes a collection of thoughtful and inspiring essays on nature and life. Together they light a path to genuine love and caring, for as we learn to recognize and respect the beauty in nature we learn, too, to appreciate the beauty in ourselves. Everywhere we turn, nature is trying to bestow her gifts upon us whether we're ready to receive them or not. Here spiritual philosopher and naturalist Mary Summer Rain shows us how to open our eyes to see, how to open our ears to hear, and how to cultivate a perceptive mind and a sensitive heart so that we may gain access to the sacred knowledge of living right. We need to look beyond the awesome sunsets and beneath the splendid blanket of snow to where the true gifts lie, hidden, waiting for our minds to unwrap them and revel in their wisdom. The jewels in Tao of Nature are invaluable gifts to readers ready to open themselves up to the wonder of Grandmother Earth. Once again, Mary Summer Rain has interwoven her observations as a naturalist with spiritual philosophy to share with the world the lessons of nature's beauty and power.

Zusammenfassung
From the bestselling author of Earthway comes a collection of thoughtful and inspiring essays on nature and life. Together they light a path to genuine love and caring, for as we learn to recognize and respect the beauty in nature we learn, too, to appreciate the beauty in ourselves.

Everywhere we turn, nature is trying to bestow her gifts upon us whether we're ready to receive them or not. Here spiritual philosopher and naturalist Mary Summer Rain shows us how to open our eyes to see, how to open our ears to hear, and how to cultivate a perceptive mind and a sensitive heart so that we may gain access to the sacred knowledge of living right. We need to look beyond the awesome sunsets and beneath the splendid blanket of snow to where the true gifts lie, hidden, waiting for our minds to unwrap them and revel in their wisdom.
The jewels in Tao of Nature are invaluable gifts to readers ready to open themselves up to the wonder of Grandmother Earth. Once again, Mary Summer Rain has interwoven her observations as a naturalist with spiritual philosophy to share with the world the lessons of nature's beauty and power.

Leseprobe
Chapter One: Mariposa Morning -- Beauty of Beingness

On one fragrantly warm and sunny spring morn, I awoke to the cheery birdsong of dawn and found that my entire being was bursting with excitement over the bright new day. Budding life whispered to me from the fertile earth and the alpine air that was as sweet as sugared strawberries. My yearning spirit desperately wanted to sample these special offerings of spring in the mountains more directly. Happy to satisfy the gnawing hunger I felt growing within me, I quietly snuck out of my cabin and headed straight for the newly greened forest.

Birdsong chirped and trilled all about me.

High in a towering blue spruce, the resident crow cawed her routine greeting. Being neighborly, I immediately responded in kind and talked to her for some time. Cocking her glistening head this way and that, the crow curiously looked down at me and chortled back. How wonderful it'd be, I thought, if all the different species of life could truly understand one another through a single common language and actually converse. Ah, well.

Sunrays silently undulated down through the high pines, casting sprinkles of glittering light on leaves and pine needles. As the sun climbed, this molten gold spread in ever-widening tide pools over the forest floor. This ground beneath my feet was a carpet of rebirthing life. Infant leaves of all shapes and sizes, swaddled in many shades of newborn green, were reaching and stretching toward the nourishing brightness.

The awe of all this wonderful budding life, so precious and fragile, yet so incredibly tenacious, filled my senses. At this elevation of nearly 10,000 feet where I live in the Colorado Rockies, the pussy willow-like aspen buds had dropped away to reveal emerging leaves, bringing the delight of a new green tint throughout the woodlands. I'd waited with eager anticipation to see this happen, as my mountain elevation causes all of nature to trail a month or more behind its siblings in the cities and towns down below.

Whenever I'd have occasion to journey to Colorado Springs to do errands in May, the city's nature would already be wearing deep green garb and flowering trees would be dressed in a profusion of blossoms, while the nature surrounding my cabin high up on the mountain would still be in winter white. Seeing this great disparity always brought about in me a great eagerness for my neighboring woods to catch up. So now, when the first of June showed its face and the trees around my cabin finally showed signs of rubbing the long winter's nap from their sleepy eyes, I too felt an exploding sense of rebirth and felt magnetically drawn to the new life that was birthing all around me. This is how I came to be in the forest on such a warm and bright early June morn. My woods had finally awakened.

I had no worn footpaths through these forests, for my journeys through them would always follow the wanderlust of my free spirit. This particular morn was no different as I carefully picked my way through the dense new growth of golden pea, wild strawberries, white fleabane, and lavender asters. I had no preplanned destination in mind. Instead I focused on merely enjoying all that I saw and felt within nature's pure essence.

Wafting up from the earth was a fertile fragrance that brought strong impressions of a verdant life force, which I likened to the Earth Mother's umbilical, throbbing with enough nutrients to sustain all of nature's thirsting needs. And the scent, the scent was her womanly fragrance of pungent fertility.

As the warming sunlight pranced atop the tender greenery around my feet, I felt as though I'd been drawn into its merriment while it also tiptoed with the touch of fairy feet over my head and across my shoulders.

The light breath of breeze gently rustled the baby aspen leaves and hushed a soothing lullaby that blended with the cheery birdsong. Such magical music brought out in me a heart smile that surely would be shared by all who heard it.

The dancing.

The scents.

The chiming music of nature.

Nature dancing and hypnotically swaying to its own lilting rhythm of life, its own fragile, yet eternally strong, drumming heartbeat. The heartbeat giving evidence of the tender metered pulse of the Old Woman of the Woods's eternal, living presence. Her sacred Presence was all about me. Her life force provided the beat of nature's sweet song, for truly I knew that walking into these living woods was the same as walking through the very soul of Her. Therefore, I placed each of my footsteps ever so softly and attentively lest I unintentionally cause Her pain or disrupt the soft and soothing rhythm of Her pulse.

Carefully I moved deeper and deeper into the woodlands while my hungry soul began satiating itself with the sensual natural offerings. Now that this high country earth had become provocatively warm and fertile once again, there was so much to look at, so many new wonders to notice and take in that my senses verged on overload.

Tingling with sensory fulfillment, I forced myself to pause and catch my breath. I held the moment suspended.

I closed my eyes.

And slowly exhaled.

When I opened them again, something stark white in the distant greenery caught my eye. I had the sense that I was …