Nature Is Not A Place To Visit.
It Is Home.
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“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.
The inner landscape of a human being reflects exactly the great wide universe that lays before us.
Life is embodied ecstatic connection, and all beings go through a life journey seeking reunion with the source.
But we do so now with a fundamental flaw in our programming, and that is this: We think that the answer lie outside of our selves.
In other words, we think that we must go out to nature in order to find ourselves, when in fact the crux of nature lies within.
“Wherever you are, enlightenment is there. And if you stand upright where you are, that is enlightenment. It means ‘accepting things as it is’, accepting yourself as you are.”
-Shunryu Suzuki, zen priest
Our true nature is nature, and nature is the Buddha, which means awakening. All things are constantly awakening in the dance of life and death.
