I’ve never understood why people feel small and insignificant when alone in nature
I’ve never understood why people feel small and insignificant when alone in nature.
I sit on the precipice of a desert mesa, looking down at miles of rolling badlands. The horizon is faint and distant. I am utterly alone in silence. Not even wind whispers in the sparse grass.
For a moment in this stillness, it becomes apparent that this body is no separate thing. The badlands are a part of perception, same as my body, same as my thoughts. This animal body is made of matter, no different from the rocks and clay. Everything I call myself is completely of the environment. These thoughts are not separate from nature. They do not occur in any separate mental space, other than the space of nature. They are occuring as impulses in the brain, a brain embedded in the environment, made of the same stuff of the environment, reacting only to the environment. There is nothing else: just one thing. Call it nature, environment, myself, consciousness. For a moment, I only see a single process. I can only understand myself as part of nature, and nature as part of myself.
The natural world created this body at birth and continues to create it at present. In turn, this body creates mind, which creates the perceptible world. Nature and myself form a tight loop. Everything is entangled.
I never feel more a part of things, more expansive or more whole than when I’m in wild places. For nature is expansive and whole, and I am so clearly part of that nature. I so plainly share in that infinitude.
This is why I find some forms of contemporary “self-care,” the kind of grooming practices that coerce the body and its form, so abhorrent. All of the plucking, waxing, stretching, cutting, starving, bulking, masking, lasering, peeling, exfoliating: all of it serves to sever the body from the wildness it emanated from, of which it is a natural part. These acts of artifice create an illusion of separation between the body and nature, between the self and the world. They pave the natural wilds of the body into yet another human-made surface. The body becomes an expression of the individual, and its wills and desires. It becomes a space to be owned, controlled, and exploited. Perhaps not coincidentally, this is the same kind of attitude towards land and nature that capitalism encourages.
This body, this life, is not subservient to my individuated human will. It answers only to the wilds of the wider world. It emerged from nature, remains embedded in nature, and will one day release itself back into nature. But we habitually deny the natural wildness of everything, of which our bodies and minds are but one wild part. No wonder we feel small, alone, and insignificant. So much of modern life is self-denial masquerading as self-care. We deny that the self is an expression of nature. We deny that the self is an inseparable part of all things.
Emerson said “the earth laughs in flowers.” I believe the earth feels in people. The earth expresses itself in ten thousand named things, including you and me. My thoughts are self-expression, but I myself am nature’s expression.
Human thought is as much a part of nature as lightning and desert steppes. So much sickness and smallness results when human thinking denies itself, and insists instead on its own separateness.
No, I have never felt small or separate or insignificant in wild places. Among all the flowers and rocks and laughter, I’ve only ever felt like a part of all things.