Possibilities

The Spring Solstice represents the point in the year where the sun rises exactly in the East and sets exactly in the West. Everyone, everywhere experiences exactly a twelve-hour day, thus equinox, which, from its Latin derivation, means equal night. This happens twice a year, in Spring and Fall. And we can say that yesterday was exactly the same day for everyone.

Of course, what happened during the day might not have been the same for every single person on earth, but it’s the idea of it that matters. We can have a oneness, a sameness, a community experience that unites us.

Sitting in my back yard, I am thinking about the idea of nature as a way of bringing people together. It’s sunny, but cold and snowing, oddly enough. It looks like the trees have dandruff, the little bits of white swirling around lightly, coming from some cloud that I can’t seem to pin point. And yet this is so familiar. Snow. Sun. Cold. Wind. Trees and grass. It’s something that everyone knows. Each person’s idea of these things might be different, but when someone says “forest” we get a picture in our heads. And we associate certain smells and tastes and feelings with that picture. Is there a way for nature to unite us?

I recently found a nature blog by a couple named Kenton and Rebecca (it’s a bit outdated, the last post in 2010), and one of the posts I read started me thinking about this connection to nature and how we can find ways of using nature to bring people together. One post about shelf fungus mentions that nature is full of objects that mimic much of our modern technologies. But, does nature really mimic the modern world, or did we start off by mimicking nature? I think it’s the latter and I think this might be the way to get it together. All of the things that we see in nature are represented in some way in things that we take for granted. Pillows, umbrellas, shelves. How about moss, mushroom caps, or the shelf fungus? Let’s get back to basics here. Obviously, our community of human beings began in nature, the ideas for things and inventions coming from our surroundings. Let’s find those things again and embrace them. Go out and look for what is familiar and you can re-commune with the environment that we sprung from, learning to be one with our surroundings instead of building over and around nature, ignoring it as a fading space that doesn’t offer anything new.

I can’t help thinking that most people, when they think of nature or wilderness, think of something old. True, we have built our cities within these landscapes and have pushed wilderness and nature further away from us, making it seem like a distant dream or something that once was. Almost a fairy tale. But, it’s not old. It’s constantly growing and changing and reclaiming its own, bringing us something new every day. It’s a new challenge to re-consider nature and wilderness as not just old, antiquated, something we don’t interact with anymore, but as new and fresh and exciting. Let’s go out and discover our roots and perhaps discover something new in the process.