Huge chunks of ice lie piled in a jumble along a riverbank.
Spring at last © Vytas Stoskus, 2025

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The Need for Being One, to Merge with Nature

Vytas Stoskus
3 min readMar 15, 2025

It’s so rare to catch “The moment” when something natural & spectacular happens, but sometimes fate does bring us together. My most amazing of these was running into the middle of a swirling dust devil, with several similar mergers into snow devils following many years later.

Other phenomenal moments of such closeness to nature have come when a butterfly landed on a finger, another time on my foot, while having all those countless other places they could have landed.

Another occurred while I was watching pancake ice float by on the Neris River near downtown Kaunas, Lithuania. Observing from a bridge overhead, it was dizzying the way the flapjacks all moved along with the flow while also spinning & bumping each other — all at the same time.

Then, I saw “the Moment!” What’s “the Moment!”? In this scenario, it’s when the pancakes stop & the river begins to freeze over. I was watching the pancakes hit the sharp upriver point of an island below & then slide past it either to the right or left. But one pancake, as if having a hard time deciding, just lingered there until another joined it, & then a 3rd, & so on . . . & the patch of unmoving ice cover just continued to grow. When I passed that way a couple of days later, the river was frozen over completely.

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Vytas Stoskus
Vytas Stoskus

Written by Vytas Stoskus

Social psychologist, psychotherapist (Worldwide thru Skype), conflict mediator; organizational, creativity, & unschooling consultant; Heretic, outside agitator.

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