The Reason You Love Nature Is...
You belong to the forest floor
I don’t know if you can remember the first time you were stung by a Nettle. The sense of danger that came with the warning of encountering this plant is one of the first memories I have of interacting with my natural environment. As a child my eagerness to wander off the beaten path was surpasses fear as I was not yet sure how to identify the plant that would cause these horrible welts and burns.
If you’re here reading this, you likely have some kind of adoration or at least interest in nature. You have probably hiked to the top of a mountain, or watched the sunrise and experienced a sense of awe, wonder or even peace perhaps. The connection and sense of belonging we experience when we are in a natural environment is unquestionable.
Im here to tell you, that you are not separate from this.
Let yourself be affected by your natural world, reabsorb yourself into what is your natural environment. I no longer recoil at the sting of Nettle, I now marvel at the accuracy of their communication.
The reason you feel so connected to nature, the reason you feel at home in nature, is because you are nature.
This might feel like an abstract concept, but despite being the perpetrators of climate injustices, humans are also part of nature. The natural world isn’t just comprised of an intricate web of trees, birds and other wildlife. You are part of that wild life, you belong to the forest floor as much the moss and the mycelium, you have just been conditioned to forget.
The incongruence you might feel when I say this, is because of the disconnection we are all experiencing. We live in a world that requires us to subscribe to ways of living which are fundamentally unsustainable not just for us humans but for the earth and its other inhabitants too.
Our current systems force us to disconnect from our bodies, from our environment, from our community. The system glorifies earning but not creating, but why struggle to be the bread winner when you could simply be the bread maker? Much of the dis-ease we experience is a cry for reconnection to our natural environment.
We often fetishize indigenous people, whose culture is built around living in symbiosis with the natural environment, and their belief in animism. Yet we forget that we ourselves are indigenous to our own lands, no matter how far you might be from it.
Colonizers were only able to colonize others because they themselves had already been colonized. The gospel of organized religion, speaks against worship of the natural world and twists it into a disguise for devil worship. Prehistoric Britain was likely polytheist, but with the Roman invasion of Britain, this changes with the introduction of Christianity and the veneration of a singular, all knowing, all powerful God. It also introduces the notion of good and evil, creating a binary as well as polarity which instills urgency in the choosing between a need for salvation or eternal damnation.
I make this point to highlight that everyone and every culture has a history of being connected to their environment, we have just traded it in for a life of convenience and modern technology.
A life that is centered around reconnecting to our natural state doesn’t require much beyond our silence and stillness to tune into the wisdom that is innately within each one of us. It asks us to reach towards it, not to turn away from it. This is obviously not good for business. We marvel at our pets, and our dog’s abilities to sense danger before it’s even close. A cat that can sense when their human is about to turn into the drive way. Birds who predict the weather by sensing the changes of pressure in the air. We have many of the same abilities, we are just desensitized to our environment and constantly distracted.
Many of us experience varying degrees of disconnection which shows up in a number of ways. Im not saying this is the only reason, but whether physically or mentally we all experience discomfort caused by a degree of this disconnect.
The rekindling of your relationship to your natural environment is a radical act of defiance. Rest, patience, slowness, waiting are all uncomfortable and inconvenient acts of resistance that will ultimately lead to a more balanced life. These seemingly meaningless qualities defy the order which we are subjected to, and reclaim the natural rhythm and cycle we were born to follow.
Whatever state of dis-ease you’re experiencing, no matter whether in a small or big way, leaning into nature will ease the dissonance. Re-wilding is always the medicine.