If we look to nature we’ll be shown the way. Everything surrounding us has a story to tell us about ourselves and where we come face to face with the choices we make about being who we really are or whether we’ll continue to fake it. Poetry is the soul’s language and somehow this magical combination of nature’s bare facts and poetry’s deep reflection bring these lessons to light. So what is it rock, petal, and bone have to teach us?

Very little grows on jagged rock. Be grounded, be crumbled so wildflowers will come up where you are. – Rumi

Nothing grows in resistance. We push and force and still don’t get what we think we want. We are hard as rock, we are immovable. There is no growth, only stagnation. To move into the flow of life we have to open ourselves more than we can bear in order to let something new reveal itself. Rock holds us down to feelings that aren’t real, it holds us hostage in a cage of our own creation. We open the door or are continually crushed. New life only grows out of the ruins of the old. We have to be willing to finally push aside what we so desperately cling to and open to what is really in front of us.

Maybe we leave a trail of ruin in our wake. Maybe we feel what we put so much energy into was all for nothing. Nothing is unnecessary. What we have done is the hard work of discovering, of crumbling rock, to let something new have a voice. All our efforts matter and make us who we are now. Chipping away at this rock slowly gives way to new possibilities.

I do not know who lives here in my chest or why the smile comes. Am not myself, more than bare green knob of a rose that lost every leaf and petal to the morning wind. – Rumi (Trans Coleman Barks)

What are petals but delicate protection. A buffer between who we are and what comes our way. Things that shake us make us change form and push us towards what we’ll become. Rock may pulverize us but petals tear off the last delicate vestiges of who we thought we were, the beautiful lies we hide behind. Dropping our petals happens when we can no longer fake what we feel or look like. Maybe that is why we fear aging, we are revealed for what we are. There is no more hiding behind pretense.

This is what life asks of us, to come out of hiding, to be who we really are at our core. We say yes or no, but the yes opens a world we never dreamed. It lets loose a million white doves. It lets us relax into what is real. Let the wind tear away everything that keeps you from being wholly who you are. Let the camouflage drop.

Seek the spirit; don’t set your heart on bones. Rumi

How do we convince ourselves that what is most real can’t be seen with the eye? We want so much to believe what we see even though we are tricked at every turn. The key is believing in the sound that rests deep within ourselves and learning to follow that. When we do the world opens, the inner world of everything that could be. There is no easy path to this listening. It means trusting ourselves when everyone else is doubtful, it means believing what we feel deep in our bones even when everyone else tells us it’s a lie. It’s finding the house that is built upon our honest truth. That’s the soul’s house.

So how does nature instruct you? We only have to watch the seasons and cycles to know the truth. We are endlessly dying only to be endlessly reborn. All of these forces of nature come to instruct the soul. We see where we get crushed, we see how we can choose differently. We always have another opportunity to let in more light. All the words and all of life say the same thing, search for the real that rests inside. The outer will only deter, undermine, and confuse. Set you heart on the secret path of light.

Rock, petal, bone. They all speak the same truth, keep looking farther inside.

kb