Align Your Life with Nature

Most people, if asked, will tell you that they love nature.

‘How?’ I ask.

We’ve been groomed by our system of governance, religious institutions, the education industry and trillions of euro worth of advertising to give our own human needs and wants top priority above everything and everyone else. Humans first and every other living entity on Earth to do with as we choose. Therefor anything goes regarding animals, nature and the Earth itself. Regardless of the fifty-some  years of scientific warnings, here we are: bio-diversity loss; endagered species; endangered Planet.

In her essay’Waking Up the Wild Parts of Our Mind’ for Futures Thinking, Marcelle Holdaway says: ‘With an earth in crisis we need to tackle our crisis of perception..…’

All of our marketable goods are created from nature. There isn’t nature – and separately existing from some other solar system – natural resources. Nature and natural resources are not two separate things.   Get it?

If our approach is land-use rather than land-care – see how it works? It doesn’t take a mathematician or an economist to figure out that by continuing with this nonsensical and accelarating drive for economic growth, ‘natural resources’ are being exploited faster than they can be replenished. This has led to the destruction of nature. It’s very simple to understand this fact. If you follow on from this fact, the conclusion one comes to is: no nature = no life.

This is a simple and widely known fact that is not mentioned in the ads and is cloaked in the fug of consumerist denial.

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So that’s the way our daily habits have been formed – to put ourselves first without a second thought as to the consequences for the natural world, (or ‘natural resources’ as nature is tagged as by industry.)

Our mind-set is in sharp contrast to indigenous thinking, where Burnam Burnam says, for example, that his people will teach us to have a spiritual relationship with the land. Most of us have no idea what that even means.

Uncle Max Dulumunmun, Indigenous Elder from the Yuin nation, says ‘When it’s about money it’s got to be ripped from the ground. If you look at wealth differently you will understand Mother Earth is such an important thing.’

David Claudie, speaking about the devastating wildfires in Australia, says  ‘The problem is not the fire – it’s people with no proper relationship with the land.’

Through the eyes of a Revelationary for Nature – this is an easily recognisable truth. No proper relationship with the land. That fairly well sums up the entire situation we now find ourselves in.

So over to you:

What actually is your relationship with the land and with nature? What does it mean to you when you say you love nature?

Is it that what you love is:

•  swimming in the sea to make you feel great,
• bird watching to learn the name of all the bird species in your area,
•  hang gliding over spectacular scenery,
• running through nature reserves to get fit.
•  taking magic mushrooms to have an amazing experience in nature,
•  clearing out the brambles to make a beautiful flower garden,
•  photographing nature to put up on social media,
• going on yoga retreats in the forest,
•  walking in the woods listening to something else through your headphones.
•  or just soaking up some peace at the end of a long day?

Please know that we’re not making a judgement about any of the above actives – rather asking you to find out for yourself if there is an actual meeting taking place between you and that entity we’re calling nature? If not, believe us – you’re missing out big time. And so, unfortunately, is nature.

Does your life reflect that love you have for nature? Is there an exchange of energy or is it just one way? Does your heart open in emotional response when you’re meeting with Nature? Is it reciprocated? We’re not saying it should or shouldn’t be that way. We’re asking that you find out for yourself where you stand.

Do you feel welcome in nature? Does your heart awaken when you’re in your favourite place? Can you hear the voice of nature? Please consider these questions. Find out for yourself what your relationship with nature actually is.

Screens won’t help you in this quest, so you can turn off the tech.

When you’re surrounded by man-made environments do you long to be with Nature? Or do you just look at a screen to distract yourself from the loneliness of your disconnect from Mother Earth? Do you feel cared for by the world or do you feel abandoned?

So please take the trouble to enquire for yourself, in order to find out what actually is your relationship with the natural world. Do you fit like hand to glove? Or are you terrified of silence or of the dark or of a bee? These are important questions to put to yourself – to find out about the nature of you.

Nature is packing her bags – pushed to the very edge of this land by increasing human population; industrial forestry and agriculture; economic priority – (not economic need, please notice this distinction.) and a societal lacking in interest and awareness of nature’s non-human communities. Our system of governance has shaped us to such an extent that we can no longer perceive nature.

Perceive: to become aware of, know, or identify by means of the senses. 

Nature is the key element with regard to earth systems collapse. Without large scale restoration of nature – a healthy natural environment where nature can be  free from people’s interference – we will fail.

So becoming conscious of your encounters with nature, how you impact each other’s lives and the priority you give to Nature is  key to moving away from your human-centred mind set that is destroying life on Earth for everyone.

Let us remind ourselves that waiting for politicians and industry has not worked. Actively and passionately changing ourselves has not been tried out. So let’s start with you and I.

So here’s a tip: When you’re trying to find answers to those big questions, don’t isolate yourself inside a building. Take yourself outside to some place where humans are scarce and noise is minimal, where nature is present and alive and waiting for you to turn up.

Go for a wander and let your mind wonder. Don’t press your brain into coming up with answers because the answers are not found by thinking. You won’t find definitive answers either, because the world is always moving and staying still.

Your question might be ‘What am I to nature?’ But what nature hears might be ‘I’m lonely and I miss my grandma.’ It always seems to be the core that nature shines the light on. So keep an open mind and choose what you’re given. Be sure to take your leave consciously, with goodwill, gratitude and respect.

From where I stand, nature is not an inanimate thing ‘out there’. It’s written into the deepest core of our beings. We speak the same language. Deep down you know this to be true.

Despite the ongoing war men are waging against nature, it will not abandon us because we’re made up of Nature. So the war being waged is against ourselves. Is this not dawning on us as the effects of global warming and earth systems collapse are beginning to play out?

Nature is our greatest well-wisher and the truest friend we’ll ever have.

We are part of Nature. Nature completes us. We belong to each other.

Belong –

to feel that you are in the right place.

That’s why pretending we can own land – to buy and to sell it – is a mockery of life itself. If the land belongs to us as a possession, but we don’t belong to the land in any way, surely something crucial to our relationship with life on Earth has gone very wrong. Where is the relationship?

It becomes a master and slave arrangement, which is a familiar story to capitalism. Patriarchal capitalism has perpetrated the master and slave relationship across the world – with human beings, with animals and with the land, the sea and with nature. And it’s this relationship that we’ve been shaped to conform to. Please see the truth in this fact.

This point of view may be unusual to you, but it’s as valid as the dominant view  – more valid perhaps because it’s been examined and considered. This point of view, or revelation, came up from the land – Her Ladyship in full flow through a stream-of-consciousness type rant that I was barely able to keep up with.

And we’re not saying you shouldn’t buy or sell land, – we live under a capitalist regime – buying land is the norm for now – and necessary if our aim is to protect nature during this dark era of human-centric rule.

Nor are we making a political statement. We’re not pointing to communism or socialism. Those systems of governance are just more of the same  – within the narrow field of the anthropocentric – regarding only the human being.

So please just hold lightly the idea of the land belonging to itself and see what happens to that thought over time, within yourself.

And holding a thought is not the same as thinking about something – we don’t want yet more neurotic thinking to stand in your way of meeting life. So just see it for what it is and let it sit.

Please consider what is your own relationship with the land. You eat food, drink water, wear clothes, live in a house with furniture, perhaps drive a car. All of these things have been constructed from the land, from nature.

Handing over money for something we buy is only paying industry to continue doing what it does. There is no payment or reciprocity to Nature in this transaction, even though Nature has paid the cost in real time. See – the clever ads don’t show this truth. And we’ve already discovered that ‘sustainable’ means for the business, not for nature.

Many of our comforts and conveniences are ripped from the land in countries far away and at incalculable cost. Oil, for example, being one obvious product we use copiously. And below is just one link offered to find out how you can act on this problem: https://grassrootsjusticenetwork.org/connect/organization/alianza-ceibo-the-ceibo-alliance/

What ways have you developed to give back to the Earth for all these comforts and conveniences? Please hold these thoughts when you’re out and about in the world, when you have some wandering and wondering time. See what you might discover with some prompting from Nature.

That great thinker J Krishnamurti says ‘You are the world and the world is you.’

He’s saying that we are not different from the world.

Waking yourself up – living a life with conscious intention – is to take your place in this world as if it mattered for more than just making and spending money. As if the living of your life is really something very precious – a sacred thing. As if the actual way you live could become your gift to this extraordinarily beautiful world. The map you make, simply through the nature of living consciously, would be of immense value to you, but also to all those who come in to your orbit, and therefor also to those arriving into the world after your time.

You’re searching for solutions – wanting to stop the destruction, to give Nature a chance to restore, so that all of our lives can find balance again. So that all the nonsense that is brought about by consumerism and the global economy can exit stage left.

We don’t know how things will look when capitalism falls. But across the world millions of people in thousands of different ways are preparing for the transition. They’re imagining together possible futures and setting up self-regulating kinship groups and working alongside nature’s intelligence and consulting with indigenous people – to live in a different way that co-operates with nature and doesn’t result in its destruction..

You are needed. This work – Revelationaries for Nature – is about encouraging you to make yourself into who you really are – living with purpose and finding what it is you can bring to this emergency, so that everyone will have a future.

Greta Thunberg and her generation are asking for change. So is Nemonte Nenuimo and her Alliance. And our youth here in Ireland. They are sick of hearing the same old hollow intentions and promises, and so am I and so are you, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation together. So please can we try to learn to not reject something different but to hold it lightly and to see if there’s some merit there.

The way we view the land isn’t working. While it can feed all the people in Ireland, north and south, it cannot be expected to make a profit for anyone or to ‘feed the world’ as the meat and dairy industry would have us believe.

Profit was never in the original agreement laid down at the time of creation. You already know this to be true. Nature is speaking out against the whole nonsense of profit and economic growth. The land provides our food and water and gives us materials for shelter. But it also guides us towards right action. We need urgently to re-learn how to listen, and heed this timeless guidance and wisdom from the land – from Nature.

David Claudie tells us: ‘Everything and all that is based on the land comes to our heart, it’s not our minds that tell us. Through our heart we can sense and feel the way of the land – we see it and feel it. That’s the way we do things here.’

Somehow we have to find out how to live properly, using insights that come from outside of the field of capitalist conditioning. So thinking ourselves out of this mess won’t work because our minds are fenced in – stuck within that capitalist mind-field.

The instrument we use to think with is broken. Our only hope is to get humble and invite nature into every aspect of our lives. Align with Mother Earth and with every entity that is outside of the reach of the corrupting influence of capitalism.

Nature is the method and the purpose.

Nature is as deep as the oceans and as old as the hills. It was not born a few hundred years ago into a capitalist system like we were, therefor it is free of it. Nature’s intelligence is not stuck in the mind field. It comes from outside of the limited confines of communism, socialism, capitalism. Human-centricism is a human-only confine. All else is totally free of it.

The essence of Nature only exists in the here and now – which contains all time – so it won’t be found by the human intellect, nor by scientific exploration, which is guided by the past. History cannot touch it, nor ideas about the future.

While industrial capitalism is battering the physical Earth through mining, violent man-wars, exploitation of forests and soils, industrial pollution, horrific acts of unspeakable and relentless ecocide, the essence of Nature remains as vibrant and full of beauty as it was at the dawn of time. It’s essence and intelligence is untouched by industrial capitalism and it stands as witness to the villainy that man is doing.

By contrast, we’ve been programmed from the very early weeks of our lives by human-centred prompts and now we’re trapped and messed up and dull in the mind and we have violence in our hearts. Nature is completely outside of all that.

It is therefor untainted by greed, education, egocentricity, hatred, fear, denial, religions, apathy, perfectionism, knowledge, fanaticism, self-pity. Nature doesn’t feel superior to us and has no sense of wanting to be more important than anything else in this world. Important is a man-made judgement that doesn’t exist in Nature’s vocabulary. Nature just is. And underneath the hundreds of years of man-made layers of ideas, opinions, beliefs, formed in isolation from Nature  – so are we.

So nature resides completely outside of the field of patriarchal capitalism and it waits with bated breath for us to find our way back to wisdom, wholeness and our own true nature, which is aligned with all of nature. Right now we’re out of sync with nature and therefore out of sync with ourselves.

So when you choose the revelationary road and step into Nature, step as into the Sacred. Give your complete attention. Relax. Breathe out. Listen. Watch. Wait. And wait some more. Wait until you find you’ve stopped waiting for anything to happen.

Then you can meet with Nature on solid ground. Let your heart open and let it break, because it will – break open.

In that beautiful documentary film The Silver Branch, poet and farmer Patrick McCormack tells us “On a deeper, deeper level there is a grief there. I’m not sure where it comes from,” he says. “There’s an incredible grief within that beauty.”

Grief is not unhappiness. Unhappiness is of the mind. Grief, like joy, comes from love – up from the heart. In that way, grief and joy are related. So grief and joy exist there in all that beauty that Nature holds.

And joy is the ultimate act of defiance against capitalism. Please see this truth, if you can find the courage to try it out.

Courage: the root of the word courage is cor – the Latin word for heart. Courage originally meant ‘To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.’

The high we get from the toys we buy from the motor car industry or the clothing industry etc,- the chains of materialism – cannot compare in any way to the joy that comes from being deeply connected to Nature. Nature is our own true home and it keeps us safe and on track with ourselves like no aspect of man-made life on Earth can do. Evidence to support this fact is everywhere in today’s society.

Nature’s intelligence is omnipresent and incorruptible. That intelligence only resides in the present – in the immediate – and that’s where you’ll come upon it.

You will never encounter that intelligence if you’re absorbed in circular thought. Thinking takes us away from the present. You cannot deny that simple fact.

Our thoughts are always from the past. Thought is made up from the past. It can only be put together from experiences we’ve already had – from memory. Therefor thinking takes us away from the now moment – the here moment – the only place and time that the essence of Nature can be encountered.

And worrying about or anticipating or thinking about the future is also coming from the past. And our own minds – the very instrument that delivers thinking – has become unreliable and dull.

Thought is the main factor that separates us from Nature. Nature – all the living entities – the trees and all who live in them and from them, the fungi that make up their telecommunications, the vast ocean and sky, every minute insect and seed and the fox with its quick mind – everything and everyone except us – lives in and from the immediate – engaged with and part of the living force of life as it unfolds and flows through all life, moment by moment.

It’s our own thoughts that breed fear in us – this circular thinking that clouds our lives, distorts our minds, disables our ability to function and that grips us in the paralysis of lethargy and hopelessness. These things separate us from Nature – from the here and now. Thinking stands as a barrier to conscious intention.

Make no mistake: we are up against a monolith that is patriarchal industrial capitalism. It is the wrecking ball that is destroying life on Earth. We need to find a way back to brain health, and Nature is the remedy. And the solution is searching for you.

Monolith –

a large, impersonal political, corporate, or social structure regarded as indivisible and slow to change

Stored knowledge, facts and figures, intellectualising and the scientification of Nature, these things won’t do it.

J. Krishnamurti says: ‘Life begins where thought ends.’

So when stepping into Nature, give your mind a rest. Let it be open and relaxed, not busy and cluttered. Nature will help you to throw a shape on all that tangled up stuff if you give yourself half a chance. Will you try it out?

Bring your whole attention to observng the movement of leaves. Watch as if you’ve never noticed leaves before. Relax your shoulders and breathe out. Watch the slow movement of clouds or the living pulse of the vast ocean. Listen closely to that bird – hear it there above the roar of the city. Give your listening to it. Can you feel that connection? Notice that slight breeze moving around your face. Go out in the howling wind and lean into it. Hear the distant whistle of the buzzard, the almost imperceptible sound of ripple on the surface of water. Even a puddle will show you a vision of the sky if you take a moment to look.

Look for that connection – draw it into you throughout the day at every possible opportunity. It only takes a glance. You do it with your phone every few minutes – so why not with nature?

Your phone has the potential to train you to live an entirely human-centric life, with all its petty opinions, endless hollow entertainments and excitements, misery, conflict and blindness to nature. If you ease nature into your life, the phone will just become a phone again, and all it represents will lose its dominance over you.

Patrick McCormack says ‘Find your favourite place and let it flow into you.’

And if your favourite place is far away – you can call it to mind from anywhere in the world. Close your eyes and put yourself there. Rest in that special place for a little moment and make that connection. It’ll help you to pause, breathe out and open your heart.

Uncle Max Dulumunmun told me that when you do that – when you visit your special place in this way – Country knows you’re there. Isn’t that beautiful? That is connection with the land.

So that connection is your meeting place – the place where you can encounter your own true nature. It will show you what you truly are. And it’s available to every single one of us, regardless of our situation or the extent to which our minds have been shaped by our sad system of governance.

 

WB Yeats’ famous poem Lake Isle of Inisfree ends with these words:

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Use the senses: Feel the Earth through the heart. Listen to natural sounds  – over and over and all the time.

Nature is your greatest well-wisher and the truest friend you’ll ever have. Anchor yourself to Nature like a warrior for peace. In this way you’ll come to protect each other down through the years. This is, I feel, our core relationship. All others flow from this one.

Photo: The Marshwoods in early spring. Totally free. Not shaped by the advertising industry  in any way.  County Cavan. Photo by Jan Alexander