To what kind of Earth do we think we belong?
While on a hiking holiday in the red rock landscape of Sedona, Arizona, I read The Songs of Trees by David George Haskell. Again and again he says "We too are nature. Unsunderable."
Our tendency is to impose a duality between nature and human on the world. This results, in the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, in the preservation of lands in their natural, primeval condition where "the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man."
Our inner narrative of what belongs
and what is alien is challenged by the desert.
The desert rewards relationship.
Close attention to the inner nature of the human
and the other-than-human,
the rocks, plants and water
brings a sense of spirits that dwell in the landscape.
"The belief that nature is an Other, a separate realm defiled
by the unnatural mark of humans,
is a denial of our own wild being."
The desert rewards effort.
We have no deficit of nature, only an unwillingness to listen, or a lack of awareness to see inside the oracle of nature's wisdom for our goodness of fit.
"Nature needs no home. It is home."
And we are home within it.
