The many good Earth Day activities last weekend got me to thinking: we act as if the earth is separate from us, with a big boundary between us and nature. I suggest that’s not accurate thinking, and not very joyful, either.
I admit I have done this, too. It’s easy to think that we are humans, and nature an ‘it’, something other than us. We choose to sometimes observe ‘it’, or try to protect ‘it’. Some of us seek to get closer to nature, by reading or talking about it, or by going out into ‘it.’ The common thread, in our funny time and place, is our thinking nature is an it, something separate from us.
We’re confused on this, even the most kindly-intentioned of us. Nature’s air and the air in our lungs is the same air, molecule for molecule, and nature’s water and the water constituting 67% of our bodies is all the same old H2O. There’s no boundary between nature’s resources and our resources. We just walk around thinking there is.
The soil that grows the food that keeps us alive is the same stuff with the same structure as the soil keeping wild animals alive. The sun shines on all species sans segregation, and the night sky closes around all of us, regardless of nomenclature.
I’m worried that I sound argumentative, as if I’m trying to make all of us wrong. But I have been as misguided as anyone, and I am writing with love in my heart.
We say of certain cities that aren’t very happy that there is ‘no there there’, no place for a body to feel they have arrived. I am saying that when we apprehend the natural world, there is always a there there, because there is no it separate from ourselves, not when our eyes have learned to see and our bodies have learned to feel. There is no ‘it’ out there, just a vibrant, teeming here and now where we humans and all species and the elements are breathing together . . . . . in . . . . . and out.
photo courtesy of Flatbush Gardener
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