What if your next mentor is outside your door?

I recently listened to a podcast interview where the guest was an expert at biomimicry.  Her big idea is that for millions of years humans learned from nature how to solve their problems, but that for the last few hundred years, we have worked harder than we needed to in order to invent our own way to solve problems.  And in doing so, we have missed opportunities to protect our planet home.

We, as humans, are already part of the systems of Earth and everything that we make and create comes from the Earth.  But when we are constantly trying to find answers outside of the Earth’s processes we come up with answers that are complex and that cause chaos in the Earth’s systems.  Conventional farming, for example, prioritizes one field for one crop at a time. We use pesticides and herbicides to ensure that nothing else can live in that field except for the crop we have designated for it.  It takes a tremendous amount of energy, money and time to ensure that one crop’s survival through harvest time.  And yet, when nature is in charge, the varieties of life in a similar sized space as our crop’s field will be in the thousands.  And each of those living things, whether they be insect, microbe, fungus, animal or plant has their part in the system. Each gives and receives for the survival of the whole.  

If we could turn to nature, not as a resource, but as an ally, or even further, a mentor, we could find the answers to our problems already being used with thousands, if not millions, of years of survival and adaptation to back up the viability of the solution.  Growing our food could be generative by giving back to the land and the living creatures around it, instead of just taking the nutrients and depleting the land. We could use the principles of biomimicry to learn from the plants how to make energy from the sun, or from the creatures of the oceans how to desalinate and purify water.  We could make and use materials that are infinitely recyclable or renewable.  The possibilities are endless really.

And in our own lives, we could seek the answers to the burning questions of our being in the trees or the birds outside our front door.  Even a fly can have lessons to offer us.

I have often found that the lessons from nature are the most poignant and timely.  Several winters ago I was feeling lost and unsure what step to take next in my life, and then on a walk in my neighborhood, I realized that the trees were naked of their leaves.  I realized that they stood like that for months on end, neither embarrassed or begrudging the loss of their summer leaf cover.  They didn’t judge themselves harshly because their branches twisted differently than their neighbors’ or because they were shorter, younger or squatter than the trees around them.  And in that moment of realization, the trees lent me their serenity and I was able to shed my harsh judgements of myself and move forward into the next moment wholly myself.  

This week, I invite you to slow down, settle into yourself and listen.  What are your deepest burning questions?  And what does nature have to offer in response?  What feelings came over you as you received the response?  

And if it would be supportive to you, write back and tell me what you learned. 

With love,

mónica