Speeding through the Arizona desert in a car one day, my friend turns to me and says, “Look at the Saguaro cacti. Did you know those cacti are about two hundred years old? It’s supposed to take about a hundred years for just one of those branches to grow.”

I look out the window absentmindedly until the impact of those words suddenly reaches my brain and my eyes grow wide. “Two hundred years old? So that means those cacti have been living longer than I have? How many centuries have they been there?”

My field of vision expands from a cacti colony to a mountain covered with them and I ask, “Then what about that mountain? How long has it been here? And those rocks? Aren’t the real owners those who have held their place here so much longer than I have and longer than humankind has?”

For human beings who have a limited lifespan that rarely exceeds one hundred years, aren’t we putting on quite a show of acting like we own everything? And it’s not even a true sense of responsibility and ownership—it is with narrow-minded selfishness.

It suddenly occurs to me that I’m not watching nature so much as nature is watching me. I can feel how I should cultivate the remainder of my life with an awareness of their arena. I think that the awareness that Mother Nature has been the true owner and master of this land for eons, and that she is always watching us, can become a compass to lead our lives on a more beautiful and harmonious path.

— Lynn Moon