Simplicity

“The earth does not exhibit itself nor refuse to exhibit itself,“ Whitman

It does not show off, but neither does it hide.  There is a quiet nobility in nature – a detachment – which is not an absence of connection so much as the absence of any ulterior motive.  Nature does not covet.  It does not cling or call attention to itself.

We tend to look at nature with nature’s own eyes, yet at each other with covetous eyes.

Even a simple flower - a manifestly manipulative device for the propagation of species – is really an old stoic who seems not to care whether or not a bee lands to pollinate.  That is its particular beauty.  The fact that nature does what it does, not for effect, but purely out of character.

It does not plan, predict or calculate the result, it does not toil, nor spin or gather into barns, it does nothing but to act out a certain biological imperative or ‘instinct’.  The ‘faith of a mustard seed’ lies buried within an unblinking biological imperative.

It grows this way or that, because it is what it is.  It is what it is, because God made it so.

Simplicity is the outpouring of an uncomplicated heart.  It is a heart undivided by the things of the world and of God.  It is a pure motive, a single goal.  It is the attitude of a heart no longer at war with itself. 

I walked a wilderness path and was suddenly struck at how everything around me - the Incense Cedar, Coulter Pine, Black Oak and Manzanita and all the little things that crawled or grew in the earth - were unanimously unconcerned and uninterested by my passing through. The self-absorbed insistence of humanity fell away and all at once it seemed such a small and mean thing.

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

          The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

              Hath had elsewhere its setting,

                And cometh from afar:

              Not in entire forgetfulness,

              And not in utter nakedness,

          But trailing clouds of glory do we come

              From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!"

William Wordsworth