We Are Nature!
I’m thinking a lot about something, a colleague of my wife always says. Her name is Connie and she lives in the northern Minnesota woodlands with beavers as her neighbors. She reminds us often that “We are nature!” Let that sink in for a moment! Or better yet, think about the meaning of Mary Oliver’s poetic words: “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” In other words, nature is not just a backdrop to our lives or a modifier of our days and hours on Earth. It is who we are. We are no more distinct or divergent from nature than a tree, a dog, an ant, or a stone. And our body loves it.
All of nature passes through us and is connected to us just as it is with a bird, fish, a bacterium, a blade of grass. The sun’s light produces food for us as well as for the other species; the oxygen we breathe is exchanged with trees for carbon dioxide. Water makes up more than half of our body! And haven’t the physicist been telling us that we are made from Stardust? We, along with other animal and plant species. die to return resources to the earth for new life to begin again. We are nature!
Just the other day I was walking in the Natick Town Forest and came upon a baby owl clinging to a tall pine tree about eight feet off of the ground. I was about twenty feet away from this beautiful bird. We got into a staring contest. Every now and then she would walk up the tree about a foot or so until she found a steady branch. We continued to observe one another for about twenty minutes, and I soon began to feel a deep silence and stillness coming from the owl’s eyes. It was as if she was passing stillness and silence on to me like a tree passes oxygen to us. I noticed that I was passing something on to her as well: wonder and worry.
I wondered about what her silence and stillness were asking of me. Was she passing something on to me that could make me whole and teach me how to help heal the world? I wonder if she sensed my worry about whether she will always have a place to live. We live in a culture that resists nature. It treats nature as an object for consumption and disposable entertainment. We treat nature as a place to dump our garbage. We see ourselves as distinct, special, above and apart from nature. And that attitude has been baptized by religion that declares that we have dominion over the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. We have taken that declaration as entitlement and permission to do with and act upon nature as we see fit, the consequences be damned.
Despite my worries, I was comforted by the realization that the owl and I were connecting through the senses and felt sensations of our animal bodies. In other words, through the intelligence of our bodies. Our body tissues feel and sense things and are very intelligent. And they have a lot to say to us. Yet we live in a culture that elevates thought at the expense of felt sensations. We see that as intelligence; we have concluded that abstract thinking is a higher form of intelligence than the intelligence of our bodies. In other words, we believe the abstract thinking in our heads is more intelligent (and therefore more valuable) than the intelligence of nature.
Whenever a problem comes up for me, I’m always amazed at how obsessed I can get with my thoughts to solve the problem. If only I thought harder, or read more books, then the problem could be solved. For example, I can get seduced into thinking that all those smart women and men in technology will find a way to come save us from our climate crisis. If only we put all our resources into these brains, electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines, we will turn the corner. But then I think about all those very smart thinking people who have produced nuclear weaponry, economies that value war and production over people, lawmakers who have created laws to protect polluters and destroyers of nature, political systems that have produced know it all autocrats.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that thinking and abstract thoughts are not good. Thinking has produced many wonderful benefits for people in the world. I’m just saying that when our thinking is not integrated with the felt sensations and intelligence of the body, but rather made and regarded as superior and better than sensing, we are in trouble. To integrate our thinking into the currents of silence and stillness that are felt in the “body intelligence” brings wisdom. Wisdom enables us to make decisions that are truly life-giving, in accord with the nature that we are, rather than the ego we think we need to be.
Mary Oliver, who has observed owls a lot longer than I have, says that they are endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt. However, I might add that even though they are mercilessly on the hunt, owls are an intelligence that never ends up destroying the planet. Like the owl, we are endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt. It is part of our nature. I do hope we can find a way to integrate ourselves (like the owl has) into this wild, loving, living, and embodied nature that we are, so that we don’t end up destroying ourselves.
In the end, the little owl grew tired of me quicker than I tired of it. You could see it in her eyes as they flickered. As we parted, I got the sense she was more concerned about our survival than hers.
Be well,
Bill