The Art of Appreciation
I was on a (Lindy) walk one day. Observing the beautiful late spring scenery—yellow dandelions everywhere, little green buds and blossoms appearing on the trees, lovely birds singing here and there and flying over me—I realized a marvelous thing.
All of this immaculate richness, all of this beauty…is mine.
Not in an arrogant, delusional or ego-inflated manner—it was merely that I understood it is impossible for me to own anything in the first place.
Ownership is an illusion. It is a convention which has value only when there are people agreeing on the terms, just like languages are only valid between people who go by the same rules and agree to find the same meanings in verbal expressions. The lines we use to divide territories are in the same way real only when people give them the power to divide with their consensual belief.
The ordinary boundaries imposed on my identity are, in exactly the same way, real only as long as I believe in them. In the underlying reality, I am physically inseparable from everything else around me—for the space ordinarily seen as something separating is actually what also conjoins me into everything else. I am exactly as much an expression of the natural world as the dandelions, trees and birds. I did not come to this world assembled by some external form of intelligence; I—as this whole entirety of natural existence—constructed myself, unfolding from the inside-out into this world in my mother’s womb and outside of it.
Recognizing myself as an inseparable part of this enormous organism that is the natural world, all ideas about ownership just began falling off. I realized what the popular quote by Osho meant:
If you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.
All things thrive only in their natural environments. If you take a flower away from its natural environment in an effort to possess it, it begins to die. But when you understand that it is purely imaginary to think about you somehow owning something else, you realize you never need to rip things away from their environments to somehow be better able to appreciate them. You understand that they can be left exactly where they are, because they are already precisely as much you and yours as they ever will be! You merely need to drop the illusory identification as the story of the ego confined into your body to see this.
You are the totality of it all, expressing itself in your particular form and organism-environment. You never were, never are, and never will be separate from everything else around you.
And it is precisely the understanding that you as an individual never actually own anything that makes you realize you already do. When you stop viewing yourself as a puny little box of independent consciousness, and instead start seeing yourself as the whole magnitude of the universe expressing itself as much in your body as it does in all other bodies, you realize this all—the flowers, trees, stars, birds…everything—already exists within you. You are free to embrace the totality of it all without needing to rip things for “yourself” to possess them.
This is the art of appreciation.
Thank you for reading.
