Walt Whitman said that “all truths wait in all things.” I am often intrigued by patterns that reappear across a spectrum of physical and metaphysical experience. One Lakota proverb landed fairly close to Whitman: “The spiritual landscape is revealed in the physical landscape.” 

In my experience, the resonance between the physical and the metaphysical is everywhere. Some of my closest friends are afflicted by a seasonal depression around the holidays. In the Western landscape, wildfires consume woody overgrowth, returning nutrients to soil and allowing growth of the understory. In a very similar way, I have seen cyclical depressive episodes serve a purpose of eliminating redundant attitudes and ideas, returning more basic energy to a blank mental palate and allowing the next step in a person’s life. 

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night and spring after the winter.

Rachel Carson