It’s the rainy season and all around me nature is cycling at break neck speed:  entropy/regeneration, entropy/regeneration, e/r, er, er ,er ,er, ererererererererererererererererrerer.

The ceiling of my kitchen is snowing salt from the constant leaching from the rain on my cement roof.  My view from the windows is the underworld life of the backside of vines and iguana traffic.  There are flashes of lightening and the rumble of God moving His furniture upstairs. Tomorrow I will vacuum the ceiling – this is normal for this time of year.  The house is covered in a chaotic proliferation of blooming vines, an intricate highway for birds, frogs, rats, squirrels, snakes and iguanas.  We are an ecosystem.  Wally and I are the largest of the mammals with the most developed brain but we are still food and if we stopped moving the ants would pick us up and carry us out the window to be processed through a variety of industries.

This is how it is.

Here in paradise, those who have second homes close up and head north.  They skip the rainy season.  Before they return again they call their caretakers to chop back the wild growth that covers the front door.  They come armed with strong chemicals to push back the mildew and rust and to annihilate the insects.  They initiate a war on the natural world so that when they arrive in their climate-controlled cars and turn the key to their gates they can take possession of an ordered universe just like the one they just left.  I realize that is all good and normal in the civilized world.   I like order too and I struggle with balancing how to have a comfortable order vs the force of nature here in my jungle wonderland.  My eyes are open.  My tiny speck of green order will one day succumb to a Jurassic Park tsunami.  Nature rules. It is tenacious and self-healing, both fierce and fragile.  I don’t want to fight it but to love it and find a respectful relationship in the true order of things.

I’ve been permanently changed by a life intimate with nature.  It is why I no longer feel comfortable in cities.  I can’t help but see them as places where nature is conquered and enslaved – where did the rest of life go?  It feels like the Left Behind series but instead of missing people it’s the rest of the species – the tortoise, the falcon, the firefly?  It feels wrong.   I don’t fault people.  Nature has slowly been bred right out of our senses.  It’s been several generations since folks left the farm to work in cities.  I am only an accidental witness, not an activist.  The simple absence of asphalt has allowed the living systems to touch me up close and personal.  I am captivated by a story read out loud by the leaves, written in  spiderwebs, shown on the widescreen of strobing lightening storms in real time HD.  Nature is God’s other compelling gospel and I am a convert.  

I am finding peace in nature’s economy.  It’s a challenge to live harmoniously with everything.  In the end I won’t mind giving up this body to its processes to cycle again into the great and glorious re-creation.