“In nature we never see anything isolated but everything in connection with something else, which is before it, beside it, over it and under it.” ~ Goethe
Connecting with nature is different from learning about nature. Here we will reintroduce our human connection to nature. Where did it start and how did it end?
The theory of the big bang and evolution divulges all of life on this planet and it comes from the sun’s energy. All of life was born in the seas as single-celled organism and evolved to what we have become today. In a sense, Mother Nature, or Mother Earth actually did give birth to mankind. We were born of her salty, ocean womb, slithered out onto land and eventually evolved into human beings. Within this context, we are a kin to nature and not separate. All of nature could be considered our siblings.
As homo sapiens evolved through time to the beings we are today, we have gone through radical changes in order to survive. We didn’t have the speed as some of our predators or prey. We couldn’t outrun a Saber Tooth tiger. We would have likely been lunch. We weren’t small enough to escape into tiny crevices to escape, we didn’t have wings to fly away and we didn’t have a thick fur to keep us warm. What homo sapiens developed was cognitive power. We had the ability to build, create and invent. It was our evolving brains, which led to our survival as a species.
Building shelters, inventing weapons, and discovering fire may have been the first steps in disconnecting with nature. Our powers of thinking, innovation and invention created the separation. We no longer had to bear the elements. We could build houses for shelter. We built wheels to escape, walls to keep nature away. We could kill without getting close to the animal or even another human being. Life for humans grew at a distance with nature.
Humanity continued this innovation power through the centuries giving rise to great civilizations. The more inventive we became the further away from nature we grew. Everything we created was designed to keep nature at bay. Today, we have conquered most frontiers where there is no place for nature to go. We have separated ourselves from nature to an extreme that when we see it in our back yards, our instinct still is to hunt and kill. We exterminate insects and bees that are important for pollination. We kill weeds with pesticides to keep our lawns pristine and any critters, fearful their tiny presence may interfere with our comfortable existence.
No matter how much we try to squeeze nature out of our lives, we need it desperately. We need nature to survive. We need clean air to breath and clean water to drink. We need plants, not just for food but for photosynthesis. We need the wildlife, the birds, the fish, the bees, and the plankton in the sea. As the human body is perfect within it’s biology, so is the world nature provided. Life as we know is dependent on the success of the entire biosphere. When we destroy the tiniest of cells, plants, insects or birds we are killing a part of ourselves.
“But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go far, far into the forest and get very quiet you will come to understand you are connected with everything.” ~ Alan Watts