We Can Either Live In Man’s World Or Nature
I was at work today, with not a hint of nature in all that I could see. But upon the laptop I was using I came upon a picture so breathtaking it made me forget for a moment my surroundings.
I stared upon an image of the moon resting above clouds shining mystically in its light. It was only a photograph on the computer desktop but I felt the chill upon my skin from a cold evening, I felt the magic of the moment. For an instant the manmade world melted from me as some tribal or personal memory of such a night took over. And I imagined what it might have been for primitive humans who knew nothing but nature and natural connections to gaze upon such a scene.
Primitive people had the experience of being the eyes of nature regarding itself. We surround ourselves with ourself, and so we only ever see ourselves. We navigate a matrix of our own design, cut off from nature as certainly as Adam and Eve were cut off from Eden. All for the crime of wanting to know more rather than appreciating what he already had.
We cannot fully understand the words someone from antiquity might have used to describe the moon We lack the language for it. I cannot imagine them gazing at the moon and seeing it as a literal goddess, but they saw her in a way we do not, cannot. They saw her in ways that require different words and different understanding. We are blinded to such understanding by science and intellect. We cannot both think and feel, and we must choose one or the other.
On this night I choose to feel, to view the universe through its eyes, not man’s. In giving myself over to her and relinquishing right of ownership through intellect she reveals herself to me, in all her undiscoverable mystery. Revealed, she can be experienced but remains unknowable.
What nature that still exists I wish to worship, not conquer. What primitives still live, I call my tribe. Whatever lies far from the streetlights that seek to illuminate but only obscure the heavens, I call home. The same spirit that howls through the wind, that howls through the wolves, howls through my soul as well.
This is why my wife no longer asks me how my day at work went.