To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings.
David Whyte
When modernity introduced a standard of usefulness as the measure of all things, it severed the connection between nature and those who should be closest to it - us human beings. Our communities grew into cities, bringing us all together and promising us hope and fullness, but cursing us with a desperation to not be apart from one another at the centre of it all.
Our accelerating and narrowing societies have produced a collective yearning for a return to the simple earth. Holidays and country escapes are muted expressions of an essential human need to forget ourselves and be uncovered. We regularly get away from our enclosed lives by going to the beach, to stand at the edge of an incomprehensible openness. When the city has exhausted us, we escape to the countryside which is slow and undemanding.
The glow of city lights covers up its atmosphere like a blanket. It bends our gaze downwards by illuminating only what we have built and the patterns and expectations that accompany it. In the unveiled countryside, the stars enliven a lightless sky and we are commanded to look up. In the city, we are cloaked and circumscribed, embodied and significant. In the country, we are exposed, vulnerable, small and doubtful. In the city, our lives make sense and its reasons are obvious. In the country, questions about what all of this is for wait for our arrival.
This movement between what we have constructed and what we have been gifted, is an essentially modern one. In The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, David Whyte attributes much of our current unhappiness to exactly this. This is a movement between our “work life” and our “soul life”. Our negotiation with “the material, light-filled portion of existence” and the “dark and invisible” part which has been “forced underground”.
The field of human creativity has long been a constant battleground between the upper world we inhabit every day and the deeper untrammelled energies alive in every element of life.
The resonance of city life and our fear of loneliness and missing out, keeps us from nature when it calls us to be alone with it and to let it change us. But in a time where reimagining our relationship with natural world has become necessary, both individually and communally, we might have to begin to separate ourselves from others and the world we’ve come to know.
The transcendalist Henry David Thoreau sensed the corrupting quality of modernisation at modernity’s inception. He went into the woods to be among the trees. To live the life described by Mary Oliver in which one would “never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often”:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
H.D. Thoreau
Separated from society, Thoreau was troubled by his loneliness until he realised that, in fact, he still had company:
I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the patterning of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me.
H.D. Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emerson was equally sensitive to the aliveness of the natural world:
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them.
R.W. Emerson
This capability, to be enchanted by and open to nature in a mutual and conversational sense, has been eroded by our increasingly unnatural world. We seem to have been complicit in our alienation by dividing ourselves from the earth. By erecting borders between our lives and the ground which feeds us. By breathing life into Adam but not the apple.
Nobel laureate, Richard Powers, in his novel Overstory, suggests that the world we’ve made for ourselves to live in, separates us from life. The book opens with a scene in which a woman sits up against a tree that begins to speak to her:
Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There's always as much below ground as above.
That's the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering...
- Richard Powers
By growing close to nature, we will in turn grow closer to ourselves. Nature’s nature mirrors our own. No wonder we find peace when we’re with it.
Resolving our loneliness and the devastation of our planet means seeing nature as a companion once more. It then becomes not only a life worthy of respect, but a friend in need of our care.