amber

I am standing in a garden next to an apricot tree. At various places on the trunk, and even the branches of the tree, the bark has been injured and sap has oozed out to form a deep orange amber. It has formed beautiful stalactites. In places it has trapped tiny air bubbles. It is smooth to touch, beautiful. When it catches the sunlight it is as a gemstone – a gemstone that is somehow alive still.

Like so many things in nature, the amber seems miraculous to me, a mysterious, beautiful formation. Of course our rational mind likes to explain it and in explaining it, rationalising it, it loses its magic. But that rationalisation comes afterwards. The initial effect is one of magic. If we have not heard of amber, if we have not seen amber, we would never dream it up, not in a million years. It is beyond the imagination. Yet it is real. This is what so many things in nature remind me of. This is our inner nature too.

There’s one thing specific to amber which I feel to mention: It is in a halfway state between being liquid and being solid. This carries something of a paradox for me. It feels quite solid to touch and yet its forms look so liquid. Technically it probably is still a liquid, like glass. There’s something beautiful about this: even solid formations are still subject to flow, the flow of life. We change, and everything in life changes. Sometimes the changes happen fast, but there are other times when it seems that nothing is changing, nothing is moving. Yet this beautiful amber reminds me that even at those times, of apparent solidity, still life is in a state of flow. There is a flux. The changes may be so slow they are imperceptible to our eyes and to our rational mind, and yet life is always flowing, never stagnant. This is the story that this golden amber is telling me today.