Last weekend I went to the woods. I left the city for a place where there are more trees than cars, and I came back feeling renewed. Something about being surrounded by nature fills me up so that I have more to give to others. As I walked alone through a whispering forest, I was reminded of all the millions of people who cam before me, who lived off the land and knew how to survive with nature, and I felt at peace.
We are all connected by needs. All humans need trees and water and grass and fish to survive physically and spiritually. My worldview has been great enriched not only by my spiritual and religious education, but also by learning great respect and love for nature. I not only need nature physically, but also emotionally and spiritually. And despite technological advances and how they have changed our lives, I still believe in the power of the soul to transcend matter and to be divinely supported in times of pain and loss. We might experience this, for example, when we cry out and find strength to resist when the species are dying because harm has been done to their ecosystems.
What are people talking about when they use words like soul, spiritual and divine? Definitions would be as long as doctoral theses in themselves, but I will offer my own intuitive understanding. I can conceive of a world in which, after my death, I am buried in ground an all that is left of me are the genes I pass on to my children or the book I wrote that sits on a shelf in the library. But such an individualistic perspective of the world has little meaning for me. To feel a connection to all my friends and to all my strangers, and to seek to imagine the totality of all who came before and those who are not yet born is a much more meaningful way of conceiving of the world. This relationship focused way of existing is what constitutes spiritual things for me. The matter that constitutes my person is perishable鈥攊t will eventually disintegrate and return to the earth. Yet my connection to all the people who will ever live cannot die. It is eternal. For me, it exists as energy-immaterial, not necessarily caused by the neurons moving around my brain, but by a presence deeper than that which the human investigates can ever grasp. I realize this might not work for everyone. But for me, I find spiritual strength in an energetic sense of my connectedness with others and with the earth.聽
Nature is the ultimate Saint or source of grace. She gives and gives, gets used, beaten, and dumped on yet continues to give of herself, day after day, only reminding us of her聽power from time to time, through events such as earthquakes or avalanches. It is easy to forget as we walk through the city that everything around us comes from the earth, that we would peter out if denied of the basic resources of life: water, air, fire, and earth. It is easy to shut off the reality of our physical and spiritual connectedness to it all. We humans have the power to destroy all this, but we also have the power to live in harmony with the cycles of the moon, the changing of the seasons and the beauty of the land. My hope is that we will all choose life over destruction and to connect with our natural world and each other rather than to look away.
Originally published in the April 2003 issue of Radix
Re-edited 2024 by Candice Wendt
