Lynda Young Kaffie

The landscape has been a comfort and challenge to me since I can remember. When I was younger, I wrote poetry as a way of expressing the resonance I felt with nature. The beach, the hills, the mountains, and the day-to-day of sky, sun, sea, flowers, trees, and leaf forms have all left an imprint. For me, nature transforms my perceptions. Paradoxes abound and yet, they result in a creative tension and a “both/and” versus an “either/or.

Nature is beautiful and disquieting, tranquil and dangerous, soothing and cruel. Nature awakens for me the “not knowing” of Zen practice; takes me beyond what I have learned and awakens new portals into the moment. Really seeing: truly noticing what happens in nature changes how I live in relationship to people, to spirit, to myself. The very ambiguities of nature become a place of being rather than a struggle to reconcile. Studying and spending time in nature, I find myself caught in the continuous cycle of transformation – birth, growth, and death. I am learning to be awake to what I find before me in the mysteries of the landscape.