One day I found a packet of wildflower seeds. Don’t know where they came from, don’t know why I had them.

But when you find a packet of seeds, what do you do? You sow them, of course.

So I did, on a lump of ground piled up by the folks who built our house.

Then I forgot about them.

You know what comes next. A couple of years later, a plant with beautiful yellow flowers popped up. Then another, with blooms in blue.

Which all goes to prove something: you can carelessly fling seeds on a patch of godforsaken ground and some of them will sprout, beautifully.

That, of course, is what nature does.

I was reading yesterday about the penguins of South Africa. They’ve been falling in number because they like to dig burrows in layers of accumulated seabird and bat faeces (it takes all sorts) to use as their nests. Humans have been stealing this guano to make fertilizer, so the poor penguins had nowhere to raise their young. Conservationists have installed hundreds of ceramic nests to fix the problem, so penguin numbers are hopping back.

After the lichen revelation I wrote about on Day 7, I flew back from San Francisco listening to the Sarah McLachlan song Ordinary Miracle on loop. You might know it from Charlotte’s Web.

The sky knows when it’s time to snow
Don’t need to teach a seed to grow
It’s just another ordinary miracle today.

Wildflowers sprout, penguins dig in poo. Nature just works, unless people disrupt it.

The same applies to life in general. Most of the time, it just works. Things happen in their own perfect way.

Taoists call this Wu-wei – non-action or inspired action. We sow, we grow.

That’s how it is. Being home is recognizing that – and noticing how good it feels.