You are Nature

Understanding Our Nature

When you take a pee in the woods, it’s easy to feel like you are part of nature. It feels primal. How about sitting on a subway train doom scrolling through your social feed? Maybe not so much. Have no fear, this is the stuff of being human in a hypermodern world.

We toggle back and forth between feeling like we’re part of the matrix or nature. Or as Henry David Thoreau put it, “There are two worlds, the post-office and nature.” A good bit of this is the ego’s fault, something hardwired over millennia that says nature is the “other,” which is pretty handy when dealing with the proverbial sabertooth tiger. A huge chunk of the blame also lies in all the trappings of modern life, replete with concrete, steel, and soda pop that force us to ignore nature. The overlooked reason is that nature connection flies beneath the radar of our visual system. The biology and physics are happening, we just don’t see it with our naked eyes.

Through an indigenous lens, it’s easy to see how living in complete harmony with the land and animals is absolutely necessary to survival. But it goes deeper than survival. There’s a spirit of kinship that moves through all things - past and present - in any given ecosystem.

Even ancient religious or spiritual practices, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, have the concept of non-dualism, where a deep sense of intimacy is experienced with all things. The sense of subject and object disappears. You don’t see the wave, you are the wave. Or as Ty Webb said in Caddyshack, “Be the ball, be the ball Danny.”

Then looking through a modern biological lens also blurs the lines between human and nature. Our microbiome, which is the sum total of all the microorganisms in and on our bodies, brings just as much DNA to the party as we humans do. We’re in a completely symbiotic, commingling situation with microbes, destroying any notions of being separate from our environment.

From a quantum physics point of view, everything is just a bunch of fields of subatomic energy. In other words, self obliteration. No separation whatsoever between humans and nature. Even George Lucas grasped this idea quite well decades ago when he penned the famous line, “May the force be with you.”

Yet, we still forget this fundamental connection, so we need reminders. That’s why Nature Junkie is here - to help us reconnect.