What if we won’t save nature, but nature will save us?
For a long time, I considered nature simply a resource for myself and for my change work. Walking among the olive trees in Lesvos would calm down my nervous system. Climbing a hill before the break of dawn with a friend to watch the sun rise over the Aegean Sea would make me fall in love with the world again. Long hikes in the mountains in summer were my way to reset and recharge, ready for the struggles ahead.
I would spend time in nature to calm down my busy mind and then I would go back to my meetings, discussions, my desk, my full head. I treated nature as a tool: leaving her outside, not taking her with me as a companion.
This changed when I reached a point where I had enough inner space and awareness to start seeing reality in a different way. And nature came and met me halfway.
She taught me about going back to essence and to not get distracted by form. In a society that is obsessed with form, and everything that is visible and measurable, that is quite something. She led me to the essence of our predicament in these times: separation - the fact that we have been separated from our true nature, from our whole selves. And until we are ready to see this and reclaim and remember our true nature, everything else will fail. Until we have the courage to look at our separation wound and heal it, we will be lost.
Separation is the foundation on which our modern society is built. The separation paradigm runs through our society like an odorless gas: it is everywhere and it changes everything it touches. The continuance of our current capitalist extractive white supremacy system depends on keeping the doctrine of separation intact. Without embodying separation, you can’t turn people and nature into commodities which can be exploited, harmed, killed and used for profit.
The biggest threat to the dominant system is people realising that separation is an illusion and that we are all interdependent and interconnected. If we start remembering and embodying that knowing, everything changes. Commodity becomes reciprocity, lack turns into abundance and we come back home to life and to ourselves.
In our true essence, we are deeply relational beings. Deep down we long for that connection that we once knew and lived:
- the connection with ourselves and knowing who we truly are and what we are here for
- the deep connection with others
- the deep remembering that we are nature and not separate from nature
In nature, every single part of the ecosystem plays their unique role, aligned with their true nature. And not only that: they sense into each other’s authentic power and knowledge. The relations between the parts are as important as the parts in and of themselves. Fungi communicate with the roots of trees and plants in the forest, and together they take care of each other. The buds know when to bloom. The birds know when to leave and when to return. Like an orchestra: nature is in harmony because every part is attuned with itself, so the harmony flows.
So, what if we don’t need new technologies, sophisticated strategies or another narrative to change the world for the better? What would happen if as humanity, we would simply tune in again with our true nature and remember the place where we belong in the ecosystem? What would happen if we let the universal principles of nature guide us: reciprocity, abundance, our unique power as human beings (instead of giving our power away to a system that distracts, oppresses, extracts). What would happen if these principles would replace the foundations of modern society: profit, control, competition, extraction? What if the way out is as simple as remembering our true nature and from there all the rest will follow?
We are the only species that is out of touch with its innate wisdom. We leave so much of it untapped, even if we are convinced of the contrary. We invest billions into artificial intelligence (not to say that AI can’t be useful), but we refuse to spend some of our time tuning in with our inner knowing, beyond the constructs of our egos and our conditioned, logical minds. As all the wisdom traditions and indigenous knowledge have been telling us for millennia: the answers are already here. We just need to be ready and gather the courage to tune in: with nature, with others, with ourselves.
The resistance to go inwards and to tune in with our deeper knowing is a product of our times and a product of our modern minds. We prefer to not go there out of fear of what we will find: woundings related to our upbringing, our past, the collective we were born into. It takes courage to start a journey without knowing where it will take you.
But the good news is that we were never meant to do this alone. We are meant to do this in community, in safe spaces where we can share, be seen and be held by the collective wisdom of the group. We are meant to do this in nature, who mirrors our true nature back to us and shows us the way. And even when we turn inwards, in the stillness, we encounter a soft and fierce power that is bigger than us, ancestors and future generations rooting for us. From that source anything is possible and transformative action is inevitable.
