True Nature

June 17, 2019

True Nature is a thing of beauty. A certain kind of unapologetically honest, shameless, kind of beauty.

Here’s what I know about my own True Nature: it doesn’t want, nor does it like, to hide in the bushes or in the caves, hiding from all beings, despite the fact that it thinks of its physical manifestation as a hideous troll. But True Nature is able to look beyond this, claws and hairy-face and all, walking proudly during daytime in the forest. It doesn’t make any attempts to muffle the sound of its troll-like footsteps, and greets all other forest creatures with a crooked — but genuine — smile. 

True Nature lives for beauty — it feeds on beauty, it thrives on beauty. The only thing it knows how to do is to create more of it, in various shapes and forms. But what kind of beauty exactly, you may ask? Does a troll even know beauty? The beauty it craves to create is the nurturing kind, the kind which feeds life around it, sustaining it effortlessly.

Renouncing this True Nature, or my one True Self, would be a disservice to the forest and its beings. And yet, there’s so many things the troll engages with which, slowly but surely, dismiss the potential of the blooming of all that beauty. 

The troll doesn’t want to feed on emotional junk food — oh no; the troll’s soul wants to eat organic. The soul of a being embracing its True Nature is just like an eternally ripe avocado, never too soft, never too hard. Sure, it oxidises a little bit every now and then, but True Nature knows that it’s nothing more than a thin, outer layer, which can be easily scraped away. Perhaps even with the softest of spoons.

True Nature loves to love, and doesn’t ask permission to do it. It knows how to make it not easy but simple, frictionless. Too often, my troll still lives in those bushes, walking only when it’s dark out and watching out for dry branches that could make a noise. But it doesn’t always do this — it knows it loves the forest, and that there’s no place like it.


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Written by Ricardo Magalhães who works for the Internet. By day, a front-end web developer with a passion for typography and design. By night, he sleeps. Follow me on Mastodon.