Affinity with Nature: A Contemplation
Affinity with Nature: A Contemplation
Nature gradually lifts the accumulated noise from our mind and we can switch to a different pace and rhythm.
World is made of many dimensions. There is the visible and the invisible, there is the measurable and that which can merely be sensed or perceived. What measuring unit should we apply to the greatness of music or poetry, what is the exact weight of experienced goodness or beauty? Inevitably, there are phenomena and experiences that may carry great import for us, but we can never attribute any singular, uniform definition or measure to them.
One of those phenomena, for me, is nature. For many years, our family had a country house in the woods more or less in the middle of nowhere. ‘The middle of nowhere’ is for me often the centre of it all. Even today, it vexes me should I not be able to walk in the wild for a while – to walk, or perhaps even jog, but not drive, regardless of the season. Thinking back on my life, these are the times that I’ve had the opportunity to regularly go into the woods, the marshes, the meadows, the seasides or riversides, that I’ve found most fulfilling.
To me, nature is visible and invisible at the same time. One can, of course, give a number to the square kilometres of a forest, or calculate the steres of timber in it, or state the physical depth of a lake, but our experience of nature will eventually still depend on our personal perceptiveness. Nature lets the mind rest of human creation, frees us from our subjective framings and ideas, offers us a reflection of a part of us that is deeper and more instinctive than all our opinions and debates and usual reasonings. Nature gradually lifts the accumulated noise from our mind and we can switch to a different pace and rhythm.
Whether we realize it or not, nature is a part of our subconscious, reminding us from where, from which perceptions we hail from. And this is not to refer to some Darwinist evolutionism, but rather to say that for the majority of our history, the majority of humanity has lived amidst nature, or at least by it. Why else would we be taking flowers to the ill, why else would we care for our pets, or have our toys copy the living. All this is a link to our past, our thirst for a touch of nature, even if, in our daily lives, we have estranged ourselves from it, or become distant to it.
Yet apart from the balancing and calming, nature has another relevant effect on me. It reminds me that I’m part of a larger whole. Why does a cowslip flower? Why does a starling make a nest? Why does a spider spin its web? No doubt these questions could also be answered pragmatically – to pollenate, to propagate, to feed. Yet all of them can similarly be said to just fulfill their role – if they didn’t, they wouldn’t exist. And probably much else of which they’re part of wouldn’t exist either. Which has led to me to realize – everybody has a role to play, and our task is, again and again, to understand ours.
At a time when mankind is drifting ever further from nature – already in the sense of its habitat, if nothing else (by today, there are more people on the planet living in the cities than in the countryside) – it is worthwhile thinking how it may affect our wider worldview and decisions. More so, if those decisions affect not only ourselves, but some larger community, or perhaps the society at large as well – what will we design our homes, our cities to be like when nature matters to us, when it is of personal relevance and significance for us, and what will we design them to be like when we consider nature personally irrelevant and secondary. (It is precisely for the lack of this personal meaning that I often feel the so-called green policies turn short-sightedly alien to nature, making it a merely abstract, even utilitarian category, rather than an integral one – read about it in the Sami case here.) What will our understanding of a man’s self-fulfilment, of one’s needs or health be like when we nature speaks to us, and what will it be like when our eyes and ears are shut to its appeal?
The world is rich with various research and statistics. It is by these that we usually inform ourselves about the ‘truth’ of the ‘matter’. Yet often enough it feels equally relevant to notice what was it that wasn’t researched, or even if it was, was given little or no significance, left in the shadows. I was only recently told of a statistic that suggests that hospitals with rooms opening unto green, as well as those with gardens, heal the patients faster than those where these opportunities are not available. If so, shouldn’t this be a prerequisite to any new medical establishment? Or how about a statistic on the mental balance of those that till the land, or work in the garden, versus those that don’t? Or a statistic on how have the perceptions of people changed in the cities when more greenery is maintained, versus those where it is not?
Drawing away from nature, we seem to have sacrificed something significant in our sensibilities to a mechanistic and overly rationalist mind. Once we’ve set ourselves apart as those entitled to lord it over other life, reduced our roots to genetics and placed spending power on self-fulfilment’s seat, and thought that it is social networking that means greater connectedness, an artificiality seems to have gradually settled into us. We have grown into a forgetfulness of a wider bond and a deeper way of fulfilment that we also carry, and that makes us what we are just as much as our material heritage or needs.
Life is always more than a headline or slogan. Life is all that is alive, around us and within us. The ceaseless tingling of creation that never quite stops. Wouldn’t a return to a realization of this be precisely one of the threads to instil new unity in us in our age of division?