Nature

Between the Roots has me thinking about nature. Tonight I was travelling through the park, watching ducks move along the river, a deer forage near the trees, and a marmot hurry back toward its hole. I was still in the middle of the city, but there are stretches through that park where I can go quite a while without seeing another person. It got me thinking about growing up in the country, where that kind of quiet was normal and cities were the scary place. Too many people, too much traffic, too much happening at once. Now I look at it differently. I love being able to find that quiet, but I also know I could probably never live in the country again. The city gives me a freedom I would lose out there. Things are closer, I can get where I need to go, and somehow I can still disappear into nature for a while without ever really leaving the city. That thought wandered into places where even the green spaces are crowded. Cities where you may technically be surrounded by trees and grass but never really get away from people. It made me appreciate what I have here, and honestly, when I started writing this I thought that was probably what this was going to be about. Country versus city. Nature tucked inside a place built by people. I was not really sure where the thought was going, so I just kept writing. Then somewhere along the way, it changed direction. I started thinking about something I had not been thinking about when I began. I have thought many times about travelling and serving in places where people are harder to reach, places where resources are limited or where there may even be restrictions on how people can serve. There is something about travelling farther that can make service feel bigger, almost as though distance somehow gives it more importance. But while writing about nature and distance, I started thinking about here. The same needs exist close to home. In some ways a city makes them easier to see because people gather in the same places. Parks, downtown streets, shelters, bus stops and services all bring people together. When someone is struggling, sometimes they are right in front of you. Outside the city, the same struggles can disappear into the distance. Someone can live only a few kilometres away and still be much harder to reach because there is no transit, no food bank nearby, no shelter around the corner and sometimes nobody regularly passing by who would even know they needed help. There is a grumpy old man I know who questions why I go out and feed the "bums and crackheads." He does not understand why I spend my time doing it and has never been shy about saying so. The funny thing is, he does the same thing. He knows people living farther out, people I may never meet because they are hidden from the places I normally travel. He gets food to them when they need it. He may not call what he does the same thing I call mine, and he may not even recognize the connection, but underneath it we are both doing something very similar. I serve the people I can reach, and he serves people who are harder for me to reach. That brought me back to a question Diane asked a couple of weeks ago: "How global is your spirituality?" When I first heard it, I thought of global as distance. How far does my faith reach? How much of the world am I touching? Am I willing to travel somewhere else and serve somewhere beyond the little place where I live? But now I wonder if I was measuring it wrong. Maybe global spirituality is not about how far I can personally travel. Maybe it is about whether what I believe ever moves outward from me. I have asked before, what is your life touching? If everyone who wanted to serve decided they needed to travel across the world to do something meaningful, who would be left to serve the people close to home? I can keep serving the people I know I can reach. The grumpy old man can keep feeding the people hidden farther out. Someone else can serve in another province, and someone else can serve in another country. There are people who can go into places I may never be able to reach at all. None of those things are smaller simply because one happens farther away than another. And somehow, after wandering through all of that, I ended up right back where I started. Nature. Nature does not depend on one thing doing everything. Birds spread seeds. Bears carry nutrients through the forest. Bees pollinate. Worms work the soil. Rivers carry life from one place to another, and roots stretch beneath the ground where nobody can see them. None of those things are responsible for the whole forest, but each one gives something, and together they become part of something far bigger than any one of them could sustain alone. Maybe service works the same way. I do not need to be the one who travels to every faraway place. Maybe I am needed right where I am. I can carry the seed I have been given. Someone else can carry theirs somewhere I cannot go. If enough of us are willing to reach outward from where we have been planted, maybe our spirituality becomes global without any one of us having to reach the whole world ourselves. So I come back to Diane's question. How global is your spirituality? Not how far have you travelled. Not how many people know your name. Not whether your service looks big from the outside. What is your life touching? Between the Roots, I am learning that nature does not take care of itself because one thing does everything. It survives because everything has something to give. Maybe we were meant to live the same way.