Nature the Teacher

Nature can be the greatest teacher of life lessons, if we look around and take notice. 

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Nature the teacher

We had the wonderful opportunity to visit with my little sister Julie and her family, who live in Alaska over the past week and a half.  It reminded me just how much I miss them.  The weather was terrific, in the high 70’s and it was, as some of you know, breathtakingly beautiful.  One early morning following our recovery from an all-night fishing adventure, I decided to take a walk around the block, so that I didn’t wake anyone else still sleeping in the house.  I had my first bear encounter on that walk.  Yep, right there behind their house, meandering across the neighbor’s front porch, was a real live brown bear.  He stopped and looked right at me, like, Hey, it’s a beautiful morning for a stroll, isn’t it?  I even got pictures to prove it, and was feeling like the winner of the wild animal encounter during our vacation until my dad was literally jumped over by a cow moose.  True story, we were standing in the Kenai river, fishing up against the bank, and he felt a puff of hot air on his neck. It startled him so much that he lost his footing and fell down in the water, so she conveniently jumped right over him and proceeded to swim down the river, feet from us.  Alaska is crazy….
CRAZY AMAZING!!  

But, I digress.  Let’s go back to my early morning neighborhood walk, pre-bear encounter.  At the end of their road, right at the corner is a brick retaining wall.  Right smack dab in the middle of this brick wall was a beautiful, bright green, baby pine tree growing through what appeared to be solid grey brick.  

Now a lot of us have seen plants, weeds or even flowers grow in strange places that wouldn’t appear to sustain life, but this one was unique.  This little pine tree grew out at a 90degree angle then turned up like it was trying to correct itself and grow like a normal, straight tree.  At some point that little seed either had to wither and die because of the lack of soil and the difficulty of pushing through the brick to get to the desperately needed light, or dig in as deep as it could and grow. And grow it did. It was beautiful and inspiring!

That little tree reminded me that nature has a beautiful way of teaching us life lessons, if we just pay attention and follow her lead. So lesson #1 from this darling little tree in Alaska was we are capable of adapting.  No matter the difficulty or the seemingly impossible, we too, can dig a little deeper until we find solid ground and grow toward the light if we’re determined enough to do so.  

Lesson #2, was straight from the Rivers.  

The Sockeye Salmon, or Reds as the Natives call them were running a little late this year, and we had the great privilege of partaking in their bounty during our stay. During the same trip my dad was nuzzled by a moose, I stood in the great Kenai river in my waders, boots and fly pole and marveled at the mysteries of nature.  Through my polarized glasses, I saw hundreds, maybe thousands of salmon literally swimming upstream right at the edge of my boots.  It was like a river of fish, going in the opposite direction of the current and it was so awesome!  
Why do Salmon swim upstream, you might ask?  Because the waters upstream are generally calmer than the ocean, and safer for the embryo’s they are sacrificing their lives to reproduce.  Scientists believe that salmon and other types of fish have a kind of honing device that literally drives them to swim upstream.  According to an article in USA Today, scientists state that home odors are embedded in the brains of Salmon.  Those odors of their home are basically the smells inherent in each different body of water.

When the fish are old enough to reproduce they are instinctively drawn back to the place of their own birth by these smells, and during the trip their bodies are naturally prepared to propagate.  Most of these fish stop eating when they return to freshwater and have no energy left for a return trip to the ocean after spawning, so after the difficult journey upstream, making it through the maze of eager fisherman and hungry bears, the Salmon that spawn will die afterward, never seeing the ocean again.  


I learned several powerful lessons from the fish we were trying to desperately to catch and bring home to fill our freezers.  Swimming upstream is part of the journey.  Remember 2nd Nephi 2:11:  “For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things”?  This is not easy!  This life isn't supposed to be easy. 

Some of these beautiful fish had huge gashes from propellers, others from near death bear encounters like mine, tee hee, and others from the challenging environment around them.  Their wounds were not unlike those hypothetical wounds we find inflicted upon us during difficult runs.  Like the Salmon, there are many, many things that are trying to stop our progress or take us out of the game altogether.   But if we continue to heed Dori’s council (from the Disney/Pixar film Finding Nemo) and just keep swimming, it will be possible for us to follow our divine instincts and find our way back to our eternal home.   And that is worth every sacrifice. 

So too, is the model the Salmon follow in sacrificing all for their future generations, for their fishy families.  Is there a parent out there that wouldn’t give anything to provide a way for their children to live and progress, and do we recognize that our Father in Heaven did just that?  That He sacrificed everything, His only Begotten Son, to provide a way for His earthly children to live after death and progress.  That’s a lesson I never want to forget!

#3.  One last lesson from Alaska was found clustered along the highways that we drove from one river to the next.  Have you ever seen fireweed?  It’s absolutely gorgeous!  It’s a tall flower that can grow up to 8 feet, and the color is between a red and bright purple. They have a main stalk which all the blooms grow from in bundles, they bloom from the bottom up, so as the summer progresses it leaves un-bloomed buds on the very top to blossom through the end of summer and into the fall.  

This is what I love about the gorgeous flower.  Wikipedia said it best “It earned its name because this plant is the first colonizer in the soil after forest fires. And in Great Britain it also earned the name bomb weed due to the rapid colonization of land that was bombed during WWII.”  

Fireweed growing first on blackened, burned land and after the destruction of bombs, is the perfect illustration of the promise after the storm, or the beauty from ashes so to speak. Although it can be grown in most soil, fireweed prefers rocky waste areas, along highways, railroads and other disturbed areas.  
I’m sure you can already hear the message…..Sometimes our hardest times, (our wars or rocky roads), bring forth a beauty that can only bloom from the growth of being there. 

That reminds me a lot of the symbolism of the lotus flower.  These beautiful blooms are aquatic plants that are considered sacred in many eastern cultures.  Fossil records suggest that lotus flowers may have even been around for millions of years and many scientists believe that they survived the Ice Age.  The reason Buddhist’s regard this beautiful plant as sacred is that they grow out of muddy waters, and follow the movement of the sun, symbolizing rising above challenges and moving toward light and wisdom. Isn’t that incredible.  I love that reminder.  I want a lotus plant in my pond, it’s filled with mud, I wonder if it would grow. 

Lesson #4 is the story of the currant bush told by Elder Hugh B. Brown in 1973.  He teaches us that the Lord knows exactly how to help us grow by sharing the following story.  He was living on a farm they’d purchased in Canada, that needed a lot of fixing up, he shares:

“I went out one morning and saw a currant bush. It had grown up over six feet high. It was going all to wood. There were no blossoms and no currants. I was raised on a fruit farm in Salt Lake before we went to Canada, and I knew what ought to happen to that currant bush. So I got some pruning shears and went after it, and I cut it down, and pruned it, and clipped it back until there was nothing left but a little clump of stumps. It was just coming daylight, and I thought I saw on top of each of these little stumps what appeared to be a tear, and I thought the currant bush was crying. I was kind of simpleminded (and I haven’t entirely gotten over it), and I looked at it, and smiled, and said, “What are you crying about?” You know, I thought I heard that currant bush talk. And I thought I heard it say this: “How could you do this to me? I was making such wonderful growth. I was almost as big as the shade tree and the fruit tree that are inside the fence, and now you have cut me down. Every plant in the garden will look down on me, because I didn’t make what I should have made. How could you do this to me? I thought you were the gardener here.” That’s what I thought I heard the currant bush say, and I thought it so much that I answered. I said, “Look, little currant bush, I am the gardener here, and I know what I want you to be. I didn’t intend you to be a fruit tree or a shade tree. I want you to be a currant bush, and some day, little currant bush, when you are laden with fruit, you are going to say, ‘Thank you, Mr. Gardener, for loving me enough to cut me down, for caring enough about me to hurt me. Thank you, Mr. Gardener.’”

We’ve all experienced heartbreak and disappointment. We all get hurt.  Sometimes those hurts hurt so bad we don’t know how to move forward.  Sometimes our growth feels stunted.  But lesson #4 sounds like trust God, our eternal Gardener,  to me.  He’s the only one who can see the beginning from the end and the only one who knows exactly what we need and when we need it to fulfill our personal and eternal destinies.  

The butterfly will teach us lesson #5. 
I remember Mr. Lords 5th grade class at Ucon Elementary in Idaho where I grew up.  We had an aquarium full of milk weeds to watch and learn about monarch butterflies.  He challenged each of us to find a caterpillar, mostly found on milkweed pods along the ditch banks, and put one with plenty of leaves in a quart jar with holes on the lid, so we wouldn’t miss the magic, if the metamorphosis took place outside the classroom.  

I did just that and watched several of the black and yellow creatures for weeks. I still remember being filled with awe at the change.  How could that brilliant winged creature be the same worm that went into it’s little green chrysalis just 10 days earlier.  This metamorphosis from the common caterpillar to the exquisite, delicate butterfly is the perfect example of transformation and hope.  For triumph over our physical prisons. 

I’d like to do that experiment again, this time with my grandchildren.  Mindfuel daily, a blog about inspiring the mind and feeding the spirit, points out several life lessons taught by the butterfly, better than I ever could.  So I wanted to share them with you. 

“Be patient. All good things come with time. We are growing, even when we cannot feel it. With great patience come great rewards. Be open to change. Be willing to be transformed. Without change, nothing beautiful would happen. You have to give up who you are to become who you might be”.  
A favorite thought that hangs on my pantry door is the price of your new life is your old one.  That’s so powerful, let me say that again… the price of your new life is your old one!!   So lesson #5…Be like a Butterfly, transform, and fly.
I’ll wrap this week up with lesson #6 from my own front yard.  Part of the property we bought and built our home on was the one-time Homestead of one of the original settlers of our small town in northern Utah. The most eastern part of our property has a beautiful grove of huge trees.  The biggest tree, which I’m guessing has to be at least 150 years old based on the width of the trunk alone, appears to feed all the other trees surrounding it. But interestingly enough lodged at the base, in the trunk of that huge tree is an old plow blade. The wooden handles have long since disintegrated, but interestingly enough, you can see one single plow blade and the long metal rod that hooked into the harness of horses wound into the trunk of the tree. Our sweet neighbor Emma, who passed from old age at almost a 100, told me stories of the people who lived here and the way they farmed. She told me that horse drawn single blade plows were the very pioneers of agriculture, used to till the earth and plant crops. I can only imagine that as a young sapling tree, it must’ve been thinking oh I am off to such a great start here, look at me, my roots are nice and deep and I’m growing and feeling so talI. Then one day the tired farmer after a day of work with that very plow, set it there next to that young tree.  Who knows, maybe it was abandoned with the progression of more modern plows, or maybe it was broken and forgotten, but suddenly this tree had what we would call a thorn, or a blade, in it’s side.  Now hundreds of years later, it is obvious that the old plow didn’t kill the tree,  in fact the tree embraced the awkward metal, grew around it and used it to strengthen it’s base.  The tree is old and strong and has given life to all the now equally large trees in the grove, If this pillar of strength could tell a story through the ages, I believe it might be that every difficult, unexpected, or unwanted thing can strengthen us, just like the hard metal plow blade, if we let it.  We just have to choose to grow around and through those hard things. 

So this week I challenge you to remember the lessons we can learn from nature the beautiful teacher she is, and find your own lessons in the beauty that surrounds you.  

We are capable of adapting.
Swimming upstream is part of the journey.
Sometimes our hardest times, bring forth a beauty that can only bloom from the growth of being there.
Trust the Gardener
Be like a butterfly, transform and fly
And grow around and through the hard things.


"No matter our circumstances, no matter our challenges or trials, there is something in each day to embrace and cherish.  There is something in each day that can bring gratitude and joy if only we will see and appreciate it".  Dieter F. Uchtdorf

And one more of my favorites from President Thomas S. Monson "Good timber does not come with ease.  The stronger the wind the stronger the trees." 

Let's get out in Nature this week, and take a peek at what she might teach us.