Newsletter Nijar, March edition 2025
While the last oranges are being picked from the trees, new blossoms are already emerging. In between a few rainy days we can feel it: spring is in the air! It is beautiful to witness the play of perception at work. Memory immediately colours experience and ignites a longing anticipation for what is coming. Jasmin-like fragrances will re-emerge soon, spreading a delicate and enchanting hue throughout the garden. New life is tangible, visible in the awakening garden as a promise near its fulfilment. Frogs chant their announcement and flowers of all sorts dance merrily on the same tune. Hoopoes visit the garden again and many other birds fill the sky with their tender chatter and playful movements. Sometimes butterflies seem reality-shifting flying flowers that make one rub the eyes. “Is it real what I am seeing? Or am I dreaming?”
The mornings and evenings have been cold last month. Fortunately, we have have a lot of rain nurturing the garden. Beautiful green explodes from the earth. The soil is getting richer and more and more ´alive´ and mulching later on will add another boost to its fertility. In this season we once again discover the power of the sun. As soon as it rises, everything changes. In an instant it gets warm and comfortable, inviting us ‘to play’ and work outside. The warmth relaxes the muscles and calls forward a myriad of colours. While the sunshine brightens up the moods, rainfall changes the garden into a delightful water ballet. Inner and outer nature seem intimately connected. Funny how thousands of people indulge in the first rays of sunlight like eager solar panels, while children are often eager to play outside and splash into puddles when water is pouring from the sky. Is this nature or nurture at work? Probably a bit of both and maybe a little bit of magic? So much, if not all, is a matter of perspective.
Like the Sun enlightens the world, in the same way an enlightened attitude may shape perception. When habits have grown, like weed, that turn circumstances into adversity, experience takes on a certain quality. While at the same time peaceful acknowledgement may turn the same circumstances into guidance towards well-being. From the narrow perspective of likes and dislikes control seems to be the answer but an all embracing approach allows for a more harmonious and peaceful way of living. Life is appreciated and dealt with as it unfolds itself.
It may be impossible to describe how simple ´meaningful living´ can be experienced. The secret, that actually is no secret at all, lies in a realisation: inner and outer are intimately connected. We do not live in a world, we are the world, as Yoginâm writes. The shift it is like a Copernican revolution. First one beliefs that earth is the centre of a universe that is circling around the observer. And so it seems indeed. But when one allows the idea that the ground we are standing on is equally moving and part of that mysterious universe, everything changes. The way we see the world around us then, will be reflecting our own movement too. As the Stoics say: there we can make the difference. Not in controlling an unknowable beyond in which our lives take place, but in the way we turn that sharing into experience…
In a world that is screaming for manageable answers that, like Nietzsche pointed out, provide the illusion of safety and control we are driven by fear. Our vulnerability in this vast and dangerous universe is based upon the belief that we are separated and thereby subjected to forces beyond our control. But what if that belief would not be true. What would happen when we measure every thought, every wish, every so-called truth agains the idea that we are sharing in a beyond that is not limited to human considerations? An unknown that is not only our widest but also our most intimate nature? How to navigate then? Would defending and immunising still be the better strategies?
Maybe the physical world should not be seen as the alfa and omega for orientation but as a reflection of the way we, in our sharing, are dealing with life itself. That would consequently result in a very different attitude. In stead of being dependant on a determining world of given circumstances, we are born to navigate and to take care of what and how we are creating. It is like working in a garden indeed. And living in it! New habitual programs of perception are shaped continuously. It will be handy when they will go well with that the tasks at hand. For with creating these habits we shape ourselves: as ongoing experience.
