Relatable nature

On a recent spring morning along a woodsy trail, when the green was too young to make much impression, a spray of little white flecks stood out starkly against brown tree trunks, a translucent stream, and piled gray rocks. The flecks looked like bits of trash strewn around, and my first angry thought was to wonder why someone would so carelessly defile nature.

But proximity proved me wrong. Instead of what I feared the white flecks to be (ripped up paper? styrofoam packing peanuts? flung-aside candy wrappers?) I discovered that they were delicate cherry blossoms springing up from the skinniest, most frail looking limb.

Normally I would have snapped a photo and shared it here, but the happy accident of a rushed morning left me phoneless and truly attentive, relying on just my eyes to drink in the image. I quenched my visual thirst with the gentle rounds of the petals, the tiniest dot of pink at the center of each bloom, and their soft flutter in the breeze. Mostly, I was inspired by the unlikeliness of the blossoms in the first place. Their host was a fledgling tree uprooted twenty feet up the hill, and not even the recent cold snap or plentiful rain had managed to shake a single flower loose.

Those tender blossoms were beautiful, and even more so, relatable. Like us, they seem to have a destiny for presence, an insistence on showing up against adverse odds, and an innate shine that creates small brightness in dark times. Also like us, they are fragile and fleeting – if the span of the universe were laid out on a 12-month calendar, our collective lifetimes represent a fragment of one second during a single day. This is why yoga's teachings of presence and impermanence give us enduring insights and compelling reasons to keep showing up for everything that matters: for practices of yoga and mindfulness that keep us centered, for simple kindnesses that keep us connected, for lessons of hardship that keep us learning, and for moments of beauty that keep us grateful.

In spring,
Annie Moyer