The more you spend time in nature, the more you feel its power...the power of nature which infuses all our senses which helps us be in the moment be observant and reflect. the transformation of the mind can only occur in stillness, in solitude. most of us try to avoid that stillness, we get scared of it, we don't know what to do, we can not keep quiet and sit still for a long period of time. the silence and the solitude are always scary, we are afraid to face reality, we prefer living in the illusion because of our conditioned minds. we love pushing things away instead of facing them, we try to deny the truth. The truth of being not fully happy, the truth of being attached to possessions to people, to things by forgetting nothing is permanent. We spend our precious time either by trying to avoid pain or by seeking for pleasure instead of working on cultivating our minds. We prefer being lonely in a crowd, being surrounded by the loudness created by everyone's cluttered minds, the drama and the chaos of everyday human life, instead of sitting alone with our own loud mind and deal with it. We let the "pollution" surround us, instead of keeping ourselves simple and clear. The pollution I mention here is bad karma. We create our own karma with our actions every single second if we can't come into the presence of this moment and react according to our emotions in an unconscious and probably harmful way we are not creating good karma. So staying awake is the key point here. To awaken is to learn to master the mind. When you are in nature, you hear and see everything more clearly, we perceive everything around us with an increased awareness.
"A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower - the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower — lean forward to smell it — maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking — or give it to someone to please them. Still — in a way — nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven't time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small...So I said to myself —I'll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it — I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers."
These words in quotation marks above belong to Georgia O'Keeffe who is one of the artists by which I'm inspired the most, who's known as the "Mother of American Modernism" and is famous for New Mexico landscape and her flower paintings. The first time I heard about this artist was the summer of 2013 during our visit to Santa Fe, the seeds of love for this artist were planted by a very beautiful and special soul into my heart, which started blooming after I left the land of enchantment (New Mexico). Both her and Georgia O'Keeffe were on my mind this morning during our walk in the canyon. I think it is because I started looking at her paintings and reading her books that I've bought from a one of my favorite second hand shops in NYC a couple of years ago.