Heroes Not Zombies

With the recent COP on diversity there are clearer calls for we humans to change our attitudes towards “Nature”. You know, I never used to think of “Nature” as a controversial concept, but I’ve come to understand it is…..primarily because we humans separate ourselves from the rest of the planet by calling everything around us “Nature”, and seeing “it” (reducing nature to a thing or object) as “a resource”, or “a place to visit”, or, worse, and enemy to be fought or controlled.

When the leaves all fall in the autumn I can understand this perspective of trying to control “nature” as I try to make my garden tidier. So I set about sweeping up the leaves. Again. Though this time the leaves are soaking wet from rain and melted frost, so I gather a lot of them and put them in a sack, leaving a stuck wet carpet of them on the ground.

I tell myself I’ll return to sweep up the large remainder once they’ve dried a bit.

This morning I decide the time has come and step outside to get the big brush.

But look!!

They’ve all gone. After a couple of days of strong west winds, there are none left for me to sweep up! And in the moment I stop, and I smile, and I think, there’s no “controlling” or “tidying” “nature”……instead we have to find a different way of living, within Nature, not apart from “it”. We have to learn that WE are nature too, and that this vast complex web of relationships between the human and the not human needs to be understood, to be admired, to be beheld in wonder and awe and joy and delight and acceptance.

“Nature” will always surprise us. And if it doesn’t, we need to reconsider the way we live, because we’re living a delusion.