Thursday

Natural Processes

So March is, apparently, the month of the flu. As in, I caught it, and here we are ten days later, and I'm still not fully recovered. And I'm tired of it. Seriously. I have a life I'd like to be living-- or at least pursuing.

So I decided to pretend I was all better, in the hopes that believing would make it true, and because my parents were going to be in town for a visit, and I wanted to enjoy their company.

We decided to check out the Da Vinci exhibit. And it's pretty cool. They've recreated a few pages from his personal notebooks, one of which explores the way that a planet and a sun affect the light on another planet. VERY COOL to see that!! And they've rebuilt a bunch of the machines and concepts of flight, motion, and energy into little wooden examples-- with the same tools and materials that Da Vinci himself would have had access to. And you even get to play with some of the gears!! There are reproductions of his sketches and studies of the human body. And a whole room devoted to understanding the genius behind his painting, particularly the Mona Lisa.

Da Vinci was a pretty cool frood, really. He believed that we could learn to do anything that could be done in nature by observing how Nature does it. And so he spent hours and days and months observing the way birds fly, the way people exert force on a lever, the way toes are made to wiggle through their attachment to bone with fine sinews and fibers that direct movement. For Da Vinci, Mother Nature was the ultimate teacher, and he devoted a lifetime to Her lessons.

It was a valuable reminder to me that we can learn more than how to fly or be more efficient manual laborers. Nature also offers valuable lessons in anger management, hierarchy, family commitment, survival during times of drought or other hardships, and most importantly-- the lesson that there is a purpose to every thing. Rain nourishes plants so we have food sometime down the road. Cold weather keeps the snowpack from melting just a little longer, that maybe we won't have a drought this summer. The falling leaves offer insulation to keep Earth's creatures and plants from freezing when winter weather comes... Maybe there is a purpose to my enforced inactivity right now, too...

A room full of musical instruments and war machines later, and I was barely shuffling along, trying to put one foot in front of the other. I actually fell asleep in the restaurant over lunch, I was so exhausted by the outing. Three hours of standing around, and I slept the rest of the day and a full ten hours last night. I'm ready to have my energy back. I'm just not sure how to get it.

Well, to paraphrase Da Vinci's classification of people, there are those who understand, those who can be taught to understand, and those who will never understand. Maybe it's time I looked a little more closely at the processes of the Great Creator, and trusted more openly that a reason exists, whether I have the capacity to see it right now or not.

Blessings Be.

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