Nature and Cycles and Seasons

I don't remember the first time I heard about death. You would think that something so alarming would be a major trauma of childhood realizations, but I have never met anyone who remembers when their mortality first became apparent. At the changing of the seasons, at the stillness of the year, when the trees are like skeletons, the flowers have gone and the sky is starkly bright, that thought comes home.
Everything moves in cycles and, though we live now in a semi-seasonless, hourless world, where we are governed not by Nature but by technology, it is interesting to think sometimes how far we have come from our roots and who we really are.
Nature is so much wiser. Nature doesn't go against the grain and force summer flowers to bloom in winter or the sun to shine in the middle of the night. Nature allows things to move at their natural pace; Nature has no targets; Nature doesn't expect everything and everyone to be the same or to fit the same pattern; Nature is filled with diversity and yet everything has its place and moves in perfect syncopation.
Nowadays, it seems, we think we are more powerful than Nature. Because we can create light in the middle of the night and can create heat in the middle of winter; and because we can create and then combat disease, we think we are overcoming Nature. We even have the audacity to think we are so powerful that our little footprints and meddling have altered Her course.
Nature, to me, is like a wise Mother who sits silently in the middle of chatter - the chatter where children argue and struggle for supremacy in a game and believe for an hour or two that they are Richard the Lionheart, Spiderman, or any superhero and things seems to be of huge importance - and all the while, the wise Mother just goes about her business calmly, listens and shakes her head and then says, "It's time for bed children." The games are over and reality dawns.
Powers, dominations, kingdoms rise and fall. Nature, and the gentle hearts who listen to her wisdom, go on - as Robert Louis Stevenson so brilliantly wrote - 'at their own private pace, like a clock in a thunderstorm.'
I don't remember the first time I heard about death. Still less, do I remember anyone ever teaching me what it really means to be alive. Perhaps that is a lesson we learn for ourselves; and perhaps that is the only lesson worth learning.