“Nature is not the one-sided affair that we seem to wish it were. Having attempted to eradicate and control nature, to discount its blessings, we are all the more shocked by its destructive power. For most of us, nature is not the birth of a child, the bounty of food, a gentle summer day, or the extraordinary internal processes that maintain our health and existence—nature is a hurricane, an earthquake, a flood, or an illness. Traditional peoples living in nature, as part of nature, are naturally attuned to its ways. They know the lesson of nature is polarity: life/death, day/night, gain/loss—that the way of nature is the way of sacrifice. Creation is suffering. The image is there every time you take a meal—some being (plant or animal) has died to give you life.
Traditional peoples love the animal while stalking, killing, and carving it. We buy our meat prepackaged in cellophane—we don’t want to be reminded of death or sacrifice. We want good without bad, happiness without suffering, beginnings without endings, life without death. We try to sugarcoat or avoid the pains of life. The sick, the old, and the dying are shunned. They remind us of our own mortality. Whether we like it or not, nature’s way is our way. We must come into accord with it, not as an intellectual understanding, but deeply felt in the depths of our being—opening our hearts to the sorrows as well as the joys of life. Nature’s way is only shocking for someone who lives in an artificial world of his own imagining, where everything is at right angles, and nothing is crooked.
Where we could not eradicate nature, we attempted to control it as if it were a machine—a kind of giant clockwork. As much as possible, we attempted to make natural functions into soil, mechanical ones. We start with childbirth, where life is not given by the mother as the embodiment of Mother Nature, but by a socially licensed doctor and his marvelous machines. We are fed, not mother’s milk, but a product of a mechanized factory. We try to act as though we are the boss of nature—that through our marvelous science, we can piecemeal manipulate it—without bothering to respect it, much less understand it. Often our attempts at control only make a bigger mess of things.
Nature is not a dead machine but a living miracle. Your conscious mind is not required to digest your food or beat your heart. Nor can it direct the movements of the stars, the orbiting of the planets, the migration of the birds, the sprouting of sees. If one stops to contemplate this, she recognizes that this great natural intelligence lives within. Right now you are sitting in the midst of a miracle. Acknowledge it. Honor it. Nature is neither a wild creature to be tamed, nor a machine that can be adroitly controlled by pushing all the right levers. Nothing you can do from conscious intention can in any way rival the mystery of the life happenings spontaneously within you—right now.” - Laurence G. Boldt
