Nature Is Not A Place To Visit.

It Is Home.

Andrew R. French
4 min readFeb 19, 2019
Zion National Park

“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”

-Gary Snyder, poet

It all began to fall apart when we decided as a species that it was a good idea to separate ourselves from nature.

This was our penultimate step of disassociation before we created organized religion, theoretical science, modern art, and everything that characterizes our modern culture.

And really, what characterizes our modern culture more than anything is a highly refined universal psychological complex that insists upon our absolute separation from nature.

Except that we are nature.

We are nature, working.

Though it might seem laughable, even our iPhones are created from the same matrix of nature that we are.

“It occurred to me that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itself were manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in the heavens about me.”

-Edgar Mitchell, astronaut

Even our thoughts, the neural networks that reside within our heads, are the same as the fungal connections of mushroom mycelium that spread out across the forest floor. Our ideas like mushrooms sprouting after a rainstorm.

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Andrew R. French
Andrew R. French

Written by Andrew R. French

Writer exploring the integration of the Environment, Health, and Spirituality from the perspective of Thich Nhat Hanh's concept of Interbeing.

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