Nature Speaks

Leonardo da Vinci once wrote: “Nature is the source of all true knowledge.”

He didn’t say “to be conquered” or “to be improved” – but to be known. And for Leonardo, knowing began with looking.

Not the hurried glance we give the world as we pass through it, but the kind of gaze that rests, lingers, and wonders. He would sit for hours, watching how water swirls around a stone, how the veins in a leaf echo the branching of a tree, how light turns edges to gold before dusk.

Leonardo’s genius was not in having a mind filled with ideas, but in having a heart patient enough to notice what was already here. His sketchbooks were not trophies of invention, but diaries of intimacy – drawings that began as acts of love for the living world.

He taught, without saying it directly, that art and science both begin in the same place: with reverence.

And reverence begins with slowing down.

When we give nature our time, we begin to see as Leonardo saw: that the curve of a shell is kin to the spiral of galaxies, that a drop of water contains the whole sky, that the smallest detail can be a doorway into the infinite.

Today, perhaps we might borrow his eyes for a while.

Sit beside a stream. Trace the veins of a leaf. Watch the wind write its calligraphy in long grass.

Not to capture, not to understand completely – but simply to be there, present, as the world reveals itself.

Because, like Leonardo, we are not apart from nature’s masterpiece.

We are brushstrokes within it.