I’m sitting in my home in south western Ontario looking out at the maple tree in our front yard,  standing in all its colourful glory. The leaves are gently rustling in the wind. It is standing tall, strong, and it seems like in full knowing of its purpose.

The silent beauty surrounds me but I get so busy and so caught up I forget to stop and take a moment to look and just take it in. How many times do you go through an hour, a day, or a week without noticing the beauty that nature shows you every day?

It seems like a great metaphor for me this morning. It hit me as I was hustling to get the last bag of garbage to the curb for pick up. The list of all the to do’s were going through my head. I thought, damn I should have been up earlier to get everything accomplished that needs to be completed by the end of the day. As I was adding all the things in my head, grumping that I was busy and I was going to forget something so I better hurry up and make an actual list, I turned and saw our tree. Just standing there being a tree and presenting its orange, yellow, and green leaves to me. And it struck me, nothing is that important, relax.

I tend, at times, to get a little frantic and stress myself out at what needs to be done. I rush around like there is some massive deadline that will result in me being a failure because I don’t have everything buttoned down to a tee. However, when I stopped this morning and noticed our tree and thought … wow … how beautiful. My first thought is I need to sit down and write a blog post about slowing down to take in the beauty that surrounds us. Everything else dissipated in importance.

This beauty is there for us to see each and every minute of every day. It’s there to share itself with us without asking anything in return. All we have to do is take a minute, take a breath, and take it in.

What if we approached a number of things in our life like that? What if every day we were just ourselves in all our glory and asked nothing in return? I mean be ourselves full on without placing conditions on who we are, how we show up and be ourselves in the world, or what we receive back. I think if we were to really do that, we would be like the magnificent maple tree in my front yard. We would stand tall and proud as a maple tree, displaying our beauty, and allowing it to shine for the whole world to see. In return we would have others appreciating us shining in our glory while they shine in theirs.