Have you felt tired and unsure why? Lost, despite comforts? Overstimulated, too fast, and like, in moments, nothing is real?

These feelings of disconnection and uprootedness are collective. How can it be that in the United States, the most “abundant” country on the planet, so many express a sense of emptiness? Reports of listlessness and polls of isolation are a result of an emotionally stunted and spiritually repressed, consumeristic, polarized western norm. Robin Wall Kimmerer radically (of root) notes in Braiding Sweetgrass a shift in time where “land as a set of relationships and moral responsibilities was replaced by the notion of land as rights, rights to land as property.” This turned what indigenous people called “gifts of the land” into “natural resources, ecosystem services and capital” leading to a consumerist culture that she so keenly articulates is “impoverishing the soul and the Earth”.

We are not removed and separate.

We are disoriented.

I believe in the human capacity to both receive and offer beauty.

I believe in the accessible power of awe in our unlikely universe, and how nature, as small as a beam of light cast upon an inner city floor to the expansiveness of an unbridled wilderness, can teach. These attentions to the beyond informs value - humaneness. 

What understandings emerge when we relinquish the human compulsion to describe existence and dissect other life forms, allowing instead for them to describe us? What wisdom unfolds when we accept the limits of what can be known?

We were born into a world that sold us

speed instead of meaning,

performance instead of belonging,

consumption instead of creation,

quantity instead of quality,

scenery instead of immersion,

aloofness instead of vulnerability,

numbness instead of awe.

We remember. Re - member. What it feels like to be evaluated by nature, not by credit card companies.

Even if these feelings and longings for respect are difficult to name, they linger. 

It is logical to feel untethered. Anxiety, depression, loneliness, and rage are not personal failures. They are reactions to an emotional displacement and a spiritual domicide created from the prolonging feedback-loop of nature-deficited systems that value profit over personhood; that values accumulation instead of wealth. Our mortal bodies are responding to a notion of impossible exponential extraction, a muting of ritualistic traditions, a sick society and a systematic failure.

It is easy, in an increasingly digital scape, to accept despondency. But the truth is that reorientation in what progress merits does not require more, just a reallocation of attention, of resources. Making eye contact, small resistances to unfairness, loving unconditionally, dancing, sitting in silence, crying, replaying a song, appreciating the luxurious colors of a sunset or the bliss of a bird call, uniting. These are actions available to us through some extraordinary evolutionary track, where at some point in the development of human consciousness, to survive did not just include food, water, and sleep, but also purpose, connection, and belonging. These are actions of resistance to corporatized culture and practices of recognition for nature. They say I will tend to the part of the garden I can reach.

This is what I am here to explore: so many of us care to protect beauty, to protect what makes us feel that life is worth living, but how do we care? The ancient Greeks had a way to discern abiding by man-made law (nomos) versus natural law (physis). Man-made laws are variable, created by human convention, in service to human-centered continuation. Natural law was seen as universally true, unchanging, and inherent to the nature of things or human beings. I believe there are social and ecological answers to acquaint with in mystery, in modes of wonder, across spectrums of negativity and positivity.

Introspection beyond anthropomorphic framing has been cultivated in global communities for thousands of generations. Modernity derived from western colonialism has suppressed these connections. The grain of nature in our memory can be buried, but never removed. This is where hope idles.

My labor is in service to this investigation, to this unburial. If you resonate, stay close. Reach out. I am learning how to best care, also, and would love to connect.

-A