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I worry a lot about the natural world. Truth told, probably more than I should, more than I aim that worry at all things material, the human creations and interactions that most tend to, for certain. I worry about the well-being of the hundreds of creatures that visit my house daily, the birds for the seed I provide, the squirrels for the bits of my prayer flags they use for nesting, the bears that wander down, the mountain lions that prowl, the many, many deer, the tens of thousands of thousands of trees.
In light of the new administration that’s found its way into power once more, it seems so much of this worry is not misguided, not unjustified, not even remotely as pointed as it should be.
We are a planet of such rare, rare wonder. We have birds that fly, snakes that slither and sidewind their way across sand dunes tall as buildings. We have deer, eagles, we have dolphins that know to play, we have moss, fungus, lichen, we have grass that grows out of the ash once a fire has gone out. We have trees. My goodness, we have trees that grow tall and wide and find a way to touch light in so many conditions they should not be able to survive. We have the Rannoch Rowan, above, that grew from a split in a stone and that makes you tremble when you touch it. What do we do with this place? How do we honor it, how do we treasure it, how do we protect it?
We do not. We drill, we rape, we steal, we sell, trade, barter, argue over, and destroy. We desecrate.
I have been, with a ferocity of purpose that surprises even myself, putting my damn phone away over the last few months. Somehow, a switch flipped in my soul and I just couldn’t do it anymore, and my 2 hours and 50 minutes a day average screen time plummeted to under 30 minutes a day, the vast majority of those being phone calls, or text messages to those that do not call. In this shift, I started reading more, again.
I leave books now in places I once wasted time on my phone, and as such I’ve read dozens of books in only a few months. One that I revisited, having read it probably 20 years ago, was Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and I really resonated with a particular passage that reminded me so succinctly about all of this, about the power of nature and how badly we’re disrespecting it. He said:
Every instrument, tool and utensil is satisfactory if it fulfills the task for which it was fashioned, though he who fashioned it is an outside agent. But in the case of things organically held together by nature, the power which fashioned them is within. You must therefore reverence it more, and believe that if your disposition and conduct through life are in accordance with its purpose, all is satisfactory to your intelligence. And so with the Whole, the things within it satisfy its intelligence.
Sometimes he can get a bit fancy pants with his language, and coupled with the fact that he wrote it over 1900 years ago, but the bottom line is this: We should be revering nature above all things, because it created what it created on its own, with its own, with no “outside agent” and using only its own inherent power within. Not only should we revere it more, we should live in accordance with nature’s purpose.
In short, we should be honoring nature, and living our lives in harmony with its laws, with its creations, and with its lessons.
We aren’t, unfortunately, and as such we are suffering such dire and intense consequences.
From fire to flood, hurricane to landslide, from extinctions to pandemics, we are suffering because we’ve spent so many years living so far outside the accordance to nature’s purpose, so far outside anything that resembles reverence for all that was built before we came and enforced our will.
Nature creates what we cannot, and as Aurelius says, it creates it of itself, within itself, using no “outside agent.” There are, at minimum, 8.7 million reasons to revere nature, 8.7 million different species that we share this place with. We are one, only, though we’ve changed the face of things more than any other. There is no reverence in this, no honor aimed at the wild that has existed long before we did, that will exist long after we have gone. We recklessly change all within our grasp, within even our gaze, and we then wonder and puzzle over the maladies that afflict us.
I worry, so much I worry, that things will only get worse over the next four years. I worry that so many of those 8.7 million species are facing dangers far greater now than at any other point in history, save the hours that led to the asteroid that came and ended the time of dinosaur. We are the asteroid, and every moment we’re getting closer and closer to that extinction level event.
Gone is the reverence of so many, gone is the feeling of sacredness when the overwhelming majority of us look at the forests, the seas, the dwindling wilderness that we’ll never be able to get back. We honored this planet once, called her Mother and bowed to all her creatures. We handled her with such care, the tenderness of a guardian, a steward to the lands we were being graced with.
Now we hear the screams of DRILL BABY DRILL in a rotunda and watch the words echo around and around until they come back to his ears and twist his small mouth into a smirk. We watch as we are removed from international climate agreements, we sigh as they argue pointlessly about stripping mountains of their native names. We hear promises to burn more coal, to focus less on sustainable energy, we watch as we are led by one we cannot see as anything other than a scared and selfish boy with a magnifying glass, burning ants with the sun.
There is another path. There is another way.
I will do as Aurelius said, as Buddha before him.
I will honor life, all life. I will tiptoe around the ants that crawl, I will rescue the spiders that fall into the water bowls or the bees that slow at the close of Summer. I will, with soft hands, hold those that find their way into window panes, I will cradle with care every creature that calls upon me to do so, all those that cannot ask but find their way close. I will stand beneath the trees, put hand to bark, and offer my most sincere words of apology, of appreciation, for all they give without ever asking for a shred of reciprocation. I will smell the moss and leaves, I will call the weeds flowers for how they dare to grow. I will spin beneath the rainfall that the clouds gift so freely, I will stand soaking and breathless and feel my lungs fill with awe and wonder and I will taste the magicness of the fog that rises off a stormy sea. I will sing the oldest notes back to the planet that heaves and shifts and is torn asunder beneath me. I will sit, I will stare, and I will close my eyes to the shadows of birds that cross over the soft sunlight that stains my eyelids.
I will revere. All of it, until my tired bones ache and my heart swells and I become one thing with 8.7 million other things.
One thing, staring into the stars, singing.
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