We Were Never Outside Nature

For a long time, we have spoken about nature as if it were somewhere else.

A place to visit on weekends. A landscape to protect. A forest to walk through. Something beautiful, fragile, perhaps even sacred, but still separate from us.

Thanks to my childhood in Africa, I was never able to believe in that separation.

We are not standing in front of nature. We are inside it. The minerals in our bones, the water moving through us, the air (and the thousands of fungi spores) entering our lungs, the heat of our bodies: none of these belong exclusively to us. They are borrowed from a much larger movement.

Perhaps this is where ecology truly begins. Not with guilt. Not with rules. Not even with saving the planet.

It begins with relationship. A relationship with ourselves first, and with the Great All then.

When you sit beneath an old tree long enough, something changes. You stop looking at the tree as an object. You begin to feel its presence. The same happens near the ocean, in the desert, beside a lake or a river, under a night sky.

The awakened human does not need to conquer the Earth.

He remembers that he belongs to it.

And that his material part will eventually return to it.