For the last few days my husband and I have been visiting my sister Susan and her husband, George, who live in Damariscotta, Maine. There is a reverence for nature here as they live very close to the earth and the seasons. There’s water in every direction: the ocean, Great Salt Bay, many ponds, or the nearby Damariscotta Lake with the neighborhood swimming hole.

Nature is at her source divine. Sri Radha is the pleasure-giving energy of Lord Krsna. She expands as the Goddess of the Earth, Bhumidevi, and as holy rivers like the Ganges, the Yamuna, and all life-sustaining bodies of water. In remembering our Source, there is reciprocity and nature regains her luminous divine dimension.

When we forget that divine connectivity and try to harness nature for our separate and selfish purposes, she sometimes unleashes her divine fury.

Every living being has the same divine quality as our Source, but in a tiny quantity, as a tiny salty drop of ocean water has the same wetness and saltiness as the great ocean. If we can recall that connection, and say thank you, then Nature regains the luminosity it always had. The luminosity we did not see, because we were under the illusion of possessiveness.

Every gift we give is a gift that had been given to us before. Like a child who picks a flower from her mother’s garden to give her mother a gift in love.

Offering Nature’s gifts back to her Source connects the Thread of Life circle and blesses the giver, recipient, and the gifts. By acting in generosity and reciprocity all parts of the cycle are both blessed and become themselves a blessing.

The string of islands I observed today is called the Thread of Life. These islands are a refuge for seals, cormorants, osprey, and gulls. None of us are islands unto ourselves; we are all knowingly or unknowingly somehow connected to the thread of life.

Once I heard a story about Srila Prabhupada’s guru, Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakur. A man came to him and audaciously declared, “I have seen God! I have seen Krsna!”

The Thakur replied, in seeming innocence and humility, yet in deep wisdom: “Oh, and did you also see His energy?”

His point was that Krsna is always accompanied by His energy. To see Him in truth would be to see Him also accompanied by His energy.

“For example, did you know that when we say OM, or AUM, we are addressing in the “A”: Supreme Source of us all, Sri Krsna; in the :”U”: His beloved divine feminine energy, Sri Radha; and in the “M”: all living beings, ourselves, the animal world, the trees and plant world, and the earth?

In reciprocity, we can complete the circle of the Thread of Life by offering the gifts we receive each day back to our Source in conscious remembrance.