Everything around us is natural don't fight it
Don't disagree with this and that, no
Astrology, Evolution, this-and-that-ity
This religion and that, no
And if they were not meant to be
Well don't you think they wouldn't be?
And if they were not meant to be
Well don't you think they wouldn't be? oh
Your beliefs, philosophy, don't give us peace
Destruction of our enemy, does it makes us right?
And if you took them apart and destroyed them all now one by one
This still won't make it work no
And if they were not meant to be
Well don't you think they wouldn't be?
And if they were not meant to be
Well don't you think they wouldn't be? oh
Everything we like and don't like is whole and natural
I know is doesn't feel like it and the world seems wrong
But if we don't like it now then who can we blame?
Blame god, be still, find a harmony...
And if they were not meant to be
Well don't you think they wouldn't be?
And if they were not meant to be
Well don't you think they wouldn't be? oh
The words above are the lyrics to the song “Natural” by the buddhist singer and songwriter, Howard Jones, and they express his buddhist beliefs, as do many of the lyrics to his songs. They are, naturally enough in the context of this essay, about ‘the natural’ and they express the belief that everything that is is natural, for the natural is exactly everything that can come to be. In this, like and don’t like are utterly irrelevant, and imagining that the outworking of any ego-driven agenda can tame the fecundity of possibility that Jones imagines as the natural is vain and ultimately pointless. Jones recommends that we just accept all that is coming into and going out of being and co-exist with it all. Nature neither requires our agreement nor heeds our disagreement.
Yet looking at this two problems might immediately stand out for contemporary, Western readers. The first is that it seems as if Jones is saying “anything goes”. The second is the apparent licentiousness that this seems to mandate. I want to answer these charges not in terms of defending the lyrics to a song but in reference to the character of nature and the natural itself. What actually is the character of nature and what is natural?
That “anything goes” is the not so secret fear of anyone who thinks that there is some kind of fixed morality or that the universe goes about its business in accordance with fixed laws. For those who see fixity all around the only apparent thing they can see if you deny this fixity is that, in that case, you must be saying that “anything goes”. This is, in fact, not the case at all. The context of nature, I want to say, is not actually a matter of fixed laws or fixed morality, which are a claiming too much, a going beyond what we can demonstrate, but of constraint. It is, in fact, constraint which is the primary context of a physical system such as the one we inhabit and such as nature is. And it seems to me that pretty much everyone already and pre-reflectively agrees with this since all alike would agree that, in any given situation you can imagine, not just anything could happen there and then. Certain things could happen, perhaps even something unlikely or unexpected could happen. But not just anything could happen. This is to say, in as non-controversial a way as possible, that the “anything goes” charge is not something anyone truly believes at all, including those who may sometimes accuse others of believing it. Nature, then, is not a ‘free-for-all’ but it is a system which will allow anything to happen, in any given or imagined situation, that can or could happen. But that is itself never ‘anything’.
The second issue I raised was that of ‘licentiousness’ which is something associated with ‘anything goes’ without being exactly the same thing. For those who fear licentiousness fear that nature actually has no opinion about, or allows, things that they think should not be allowed. For example, what view does nature take on pedophilia, or incest, or rape, or beastiality? It takes no view. All these things are possible in nature. And yet all people who want to seem sane and just, and many who wouldn’t, would say that these things were completely wrong and some, I’m certain, would claim that they are also “unnatural” as well. Yet I must insist that on the latter charge they are wrong. We cannot say that these things, and others, are “unnatural” for it is nature itself which expressly allows them and without passing any opinion about them, or judgment upon them, whatsoever.
There are a few further points I can make about this. FIrst, in nature that something CAN happen doesn’t mean that it SHOULD happen. Nature’s enabling of certain courses of action is not its moral imprimatur to carry out that action. Nature, I would argue, has no opinions and mandates no action on moral or any other grounds. So ‘can’ does not mean ‘should’. But, secondly, CAN does also not mean WILL either. That something can happen doesn’t mean it will happen. Possibility is not eventuality or inevitability. Thirdly, as Melanie Joy raised towards the end of the second section of this essay, we have to consider that what nature itself is silent about in its enabling and allowance of, may NOT be something that we find we could justify to a representative or imagined group of other human beings. It is quite likely, in fact, that if you were open about indulging in any of the four examples of natural behaviour I have given that you would face immediate human consequence and judicial sanction. So what I would actually argue in relation to activities such as these is that, yes, nature does enable what to some might seem like a certain licentiousness by their human, cultural standards. Yet, in doing so, it has not given its approval nor mandated that they should be carried out, nor declared them morally in order. Nature does not have a morality and, as such, morality itself, and what that does and doesn’t have to do with nature, is something we need to consider now.
Morality, as I see it, comes from groups of human beings. Morality, in all cases, is human-shaped. Morality is, then, rhetorical, ideological, fictional, and artificial. Morality is a code of behaviour that humans, in theory if not always in practice, can justify by the giving of reasons. The fact that it is this, I would argue, is another example of its human origin for nature knows nothing of reasons. Yet this, historically, has become a problem for some. An example of this would be Diogenes the Cynic who I made reference to in There is nothing to stick to. For Diogenes, the more artificial things became, the more dehumanising they became. Archetypally, this was civilisation as best exampled by the Greek city state in his own time and place. Yet, in theory, anything sufficiently artificial would and could be seen as dehumanising and unnatural by a Cynic following the line of thinking Diogenes and other Cynics established. This is why Diogenes famously went through the marketplace of a city, in a common anecdote shared about him, looking for ‘ho anthropos’ - the Greek for ‘human being’. It was his view that cities made human beings less human and so, by being closer to the natural rather than the artificial, that humanity was more vividly actualised. Cities, whilst physically being built environments, themselves artificial, are also places where artificial morals and customs are born and where they are put in place to prosper not being human but the actual artificial environment itself, to facilitate its existence and further growth. Meanwhile, out in the fields, the Cynics would live according to whatever nature, in its careless bounty, afforded them, in their eyes actualising their humanity in ways that the civilised city dwellers were deliberately hindering by their so doing. Such people, in naturalistic Cynic eyes, lived less than fully human lives.
Here again with ‘morality’ we come upon some things already mentioned in thinking about this. The first is that can does not mean should. If morality is itself not natural in its force or appeal, if it is artificial as I claim and even though it is certainly a natural development, then its force can only be rhetorical force and that force can only be strengthened by physical and political force. These are all matters of human beings and their desire to impose their will upon others. It is, when intensified, the bellum omnium contra omnes. Morality, as will be observed, is often a case of the more powerful forcing the less powerful to submit to their morals. Here, regardless of rhetorical claim, what is decisive is that one group has the power to make another group submit. Then again, however, we should recall Howard Jones’ refrain from “Natural”: “And if they were not meant to be well don’t you think they wouldn’t be?” Nature, we must say, is not something that operates like a human morality even though the humans that have themselves developed morality were developed through entirely natural means themselves. Yet what we may say about nature and morality and people together is this: if we want people free to live ‘according to nature’ - which those such as Diogenes would insist was to be MORE human - then they should be free to live according to nature’s amorality rather than the moralities of human beings. The former is natural, the latter artificial. Yet we might here also consider the notion that humanity’s culture of morality might, in fact, be a game the species plays with itself which only, in the end and in that ‘war of all against all’, serves to further the more natural game of survival itself. Perhaps the cultural activity ‘morality’ serves a more natural purpose behind its own back. Perhaps.
And so we come to reflect on the ‘state of nature’ itself. I have used the quotes in my second section here to guide my thoughts on this and those quotes were fairly randomly selected as I attempted to mimic the kismet or providence of nature in the necessary selection process involved. Nature, we may say, is not a human organisation of things; it is that ‘free’, constrained choice of the ‘what can happen’ that will happen. This ‘free, constrained choice’ is not bound by our traditions, customs or understanding either. In a song which takes the 20th saying of the Tao Te Ching as its subject matter, Howard Jones, in a further song titled “Is There A Difference?” tries to express this lyrically:
Is there a difference between yes and no?
Is there a difference between up and down?
Must I fear what others fear?
What nonsense!
Some people are content
Enjoying things that belong to tradition
With the seasons they cast their lot
Without a question
Other men are clear and bright and solid
Other men are sharp and clever and jolly
And we go
Is there a difference between high and low?
Is there a difference between then and now?
Do we have to live in pain and fear?
What nonsense!
People are drifting like the waves on the sea
Without direction like the restless wind
Not knowing forward, not knowing back
Just existing
Other men are strong and full of courage
Other men are witty and full of knowledge
And we go
Other men are clear and bright and solid
(I alone am drifting on the sea)
Other men are sharp and clever and jolly
(Restless like the wind)
And we go
Is there a difference?
Is there really a difference?
Yes and no
Is there a difference?
Is there really a difference?
Up and down
Is there a difference?
Is there really a difference?
High and low
Is there a difference?
Is there really a difference?
Then and now
Is there a difference?
Is there really a difference?
Yes and no
Is there a difference?
Is there really a difference?
Up and down
Is there a difference?
Is there really a difference?
The truth of the lyrics of this song, as, I believe, with the 20th saying of the Tao Te Ching, is that, for all human learning, for all its measurements and judgments and quantifications, there is something missing, something it lacks. What it lacks is that nature itself does not measure, judge or quantify. Human beings become knowing in order to instrumentalise and to use - and then they misconstrue that knowledge as knowledge of nature itself, as an understanding inherent to nature. Yet nature neither instrumentalises nor uses. It just exists. It is not knowing. As the Tao Te Ching says in that 20th saying, then, all that is needed for human beings is “to cast off selfishness and temper desire”. Then we can see a way in which there might not ultimately be a difference at all and in which all the knowing activity of human beings can be cast aside for the pursuance of more natural lives.
Yet, as humans, we know of certain “drives” and we see these drives in nature too. ‘All things wish to survive’ is something we imagine to be common to all living things, even if only as instinct or autonomic function. Therefore, things must feed, must reproduce, must often be in community to increase their chances of survival, etc. Things seem to be fulfilling a purpose even if it was one nature gave them when it birthed them rather than one they chose for themselves. In this context we can remember George Carlin’s love for the tuft of grass that forces its way through a crack in the concrete, taking account of the meagrest amount of soil with its necessary nutrients that provide it with the sustenance to hang in there, part of a much greater whole that comprises all living things. This “part of a wholeness” was something that Albert Einstein focused on in the first comment from the previous section of this essay and it unites him completely with thought such as that which is Taoist. Yet this part/whole conception also serves to point out that human beings are not themselves nature or, indeed, nature’s authorised biographers or interpreters. Human beings always and only speak for themselves and not nature. The part can speak about the whole but never from or for the whole.
With this in mind, there are further things we can put forward about nature and its character. One is that nature is a place of possibility yet not without a degree of predictability. In a given or imagined situation some outcomes are probably more likely than others yet we must always, at the same time, be prepared for that unexpected event or process that can happen nevertheless. Here the character of nature is that if something can happen then it sometimes will. Yet, again at the same time, there is also the feeling here that nature has no overarching plan; there is no guide, no “intelligent design”, no blueprint. Nature is not trying to get anywhere and there is no ziel or goal in all this. Nature is just a big engine of possibility. If it can happen, it will. For some this is a problem since they themselves feel a need for purpose or intention but it must be plainly stated that although nature often gives human beings these things, and seems to distribute a more primitive instinct for certain things more widely, this does not seem to be something that nature as a whole has. Nature exists because it can. And that is all. It doesn’t want, have purposes or intentions in doing so, or aim at any particular or general outcome.
Ironically, the lack of these things in nature may act as a kind of release valve for the human being who, unlike nature in general, is beset by all of these things and may experience them as burdens. This, I think, is why so many human beings, and I quoted several above, experience ‘being in nature’ as a release from the artificial world of human creation, intention and purpose. It is also perhaps why certain human beings, those, for example, of Buddhist or Taoist persuasion, traditions which focus on balance and being ‘at one with all things’ and that intend to join with nature in its imagined manner of operation, practice these spiritual traditions in an imagined therapeutic way. Their testimony is that the human being can be trained to be more in phase with nature as it manifests itself and that this acts as an aid to human well being. This then feeds back into my previous thoughts about ‘can’ and ‘should’ in that, although nature gave us a need for purpose or intention, it did not do so by making us robots who are slaves to such things. It is always a matter of their use and our focus - and we can even train ourselves to progressively abandon or negate such features of our make up and become more like nature in her manner of operation. The human being, then, a child of nature, is not fixed but presents as having the possibility for a variation of possible lives. What can happen will happen?
Yet this raises the question of ‘the human’, what we might here call human culture, and nature. Are these opposites? Are they antagonistically in opposition in their operation? We may say, I think, that they can be distinguished and variously identified. Yet they are also seemingly symbiotic and this is understandable as any and every human culture was birthed by and from nature. Yet so prodigious has nature been in equipping human beings, and human culture, that it has, quite unknowingly, of course, given birth to a creature which, in its cultural endeavours, can begin to destroy that which gave it life. This is to say that the function (and sometimes the purpose) of human culture, either deliberately or merely through lack of care or neglect, can be to destroy nature. Nature, of course, does not care. At no time does nature care how much of it exists, or as what, or how much of it doesn’t. Nature in general, in fact, doesn’t even care if it does exist. And why should it when we can usefully point out that everything that exists effectively came from nothing? Nature, thought of as the entirety of the system of ‘what is’, has always created from nothing. Were there nothing once again, a scenario which vastly over-estimates humanity’s power to destroy and negate, who is to say that a new nature, a new universe, would not come into existence in ways we cannot even begin to fathom? Here I like to think of human culture in ways analogous to the role of Neo as ‘The One’ in the Matrix films. In the second film of the trilogy Neo has a famous talk with The Architect who tells him that, rather than The One being an actual saviour figure, the saviour figure is, in fact, a role that is acted out as a function of The Matrix itself. Once The One has performed his role he returns to The Source and we all go round again. Human culture is a bit like that, I think. It is playing a role, barely perceived, perhaps even only instinctively felt, in a much, much greater whole. Rather than being saviours, human beings are merely functions. As with The One, they over-exaggerate their importance but, given time, they will soon be put in their place.
This place, of course, is the context of nature as a whole, which is, was and always will be, our perennial and eternal context. This nature, it has been observed, seems to have its own natural rhythms that go with the habitat it provides as an environment. It is said by some, even many, that becoming attuned to this, perhaps in phenomena as diverse as the seashore, a river or stream, a walk through wooded areas or even the feeling of sunlight or rain on your face, is to promote ‘a more elemental feeling’ than that which comes from a world of human creating. Here nature is again an escape from the deliberate, the knowing, the purposeful, the intentional. It offers, instead, a poetic mysticism such as that found in the words of Thoreau or Keats above. This is “the tonic of wildness” or “the poetry of the earth”. We recognise nature’s differentness, that it is not bound to purpose, to intention, to worry, to desire, as we are. It just is. It speaks its own strangely naive and beautiful language that is nothing to do with the need to ‘make sense’ as our’s is. It seems somehow more primal, more elemental, more basic, more fundamental. And, of course, it is. All creation comes from the abstract nothingness of nature and this is nothing but a mystery to us.
What human being with their knowing, understanding and explaining can make something as amazing as a tree? Nature makes trees by the million and without even knowing or caring that it is doing so and without even having a reason for doing it. It just happens because it can. It is by analogy to such miracles that the Taoist asks people to live according to an ethic of “non-action” or “actionless action” which is to mimic the nature that makes trees. The moral, of course, is that lacking intentions, purposes and desires is not to say amazing things cannot happen. Amazing things are all around us which no one set out to create and we are among them! It was non-action which made our world and so us and all the life we are witness too. It was non-action which created the many views we stare at, open-mouthed. Perhaps this is why William Blake said that “nature is imagination itself”. Nature, then, is pure existence without judgment, meaning, purpose, desire or intent. Nature is unconcerned change, a constant becoming or imagining if we stay with Blake’s idea.
Yet in this recognition there is a question: is nature innocent or simple? Is it both? Or neither? Here we have opportunity to distinguish human beings from nature once more for we are lots of things it is not. Human beings want to get to know and understand things so they can use them to their imagined benefit. Nature does not do that. Nature just flows forwards in whatever ways it can. If one thing cannot happen, then something else will. Or perhaps nothing will. What does it matter? Since nature has no purpose or intent ‘what happens next’ is of little importance. Nature is, of course, consequential but only in a way in which there is indifference to consequentiality. Here I remember the British farmer, James Rebanks, once telling a story of how nature will allow a sheep’s horns to grow right into its head if you let them, killing the sheep that has grown them. It can happen and so it sometimes does. Nature gives birth to a sheep whose natural processes then kill it. Rebanks, as a responsible farmer, has to cut the horns of sheep whose horns might develop in this way. Nature is unknowing and irresponsible. It doesn’t act with an eye to the future. It just acts and in this is both a kind of innocence and a kind of complexity that functions as a simplicity. Nature has a complete lack of guile. It is not wily. It does not need to be smart. It doesn’t survive on its wits. It is not looking for what will follow as a consequence. Consequences happen and causes have effects but nature remains unconcerned about them and impervious to them in its ubiquitous flexibility.
This brings us back to morality. Morality is not such an innocence and we are not innocent. Morality is a knowingness or, as the Bible describes it in Genesis 2-3, a fall. Human beings have morality exactly because they cannot be innocent or act innocently. The Genesis story, which is much cleverer and deeper than many dismissive people imagine, links lack of innocence with desire to know in what I read as an ancient warning to the people of the earth about separating themselves from the earth and so the nature that gave them birth. In that mythology it is, of course, bound up with a god figure but this should not distract us from this fundamental point in a story in which this god is bound up intimately with nature through creation in any case. The human beings desired lack of innocence, they craved to know, and then, when they did know, losing their innocence in the process, they experienced it as a loss, as pain and as a fall from grace. Nature is that grace and we have often ever since distinguished ourselves from it and set ourselves above it, seeking to master the innocence we once gave up through even more and more knowing. Genesis, I believe, teaches us that this can never be the case for innocence and knowing cannot mix. Like matter and anti-matter, they cannot exist in the same space. Too rarely do human beings learn from nature in the sense of attempting to become like nature itself is. Writer Rebecca Solnit pronounces herself surprised that “we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown” and here the “ugly scenarios” are those of our knowing and “the pure unknown” is the innocence of nature. Nature is the pure unknown. It is the unknowing, the uncaring, the unknowable, the place where knowledge ceases to matter or exist. In contrast, human beings appear very much like those depicted in yet another song by Howard Jones, this time “Hunger for the Flesh”:
Spare a thought for the souls
Who cannot leave this earth
The attachments bind so tightly, not a chance
Not a chance of a new birth
The river gently beckons
But the answer is no
Gripping their illusions
They cannot let them go
Hunger for the flesh
Leads them to a weaker heart
Mortals who imprisoned themselves
Let them have a new start
Wishing to hold onto life and all its games
Singing their lament song
Holding back the change
They came here for to dance
To learn and not to cling
Holding onto life
As if it were the important thing
Hunger for the flesh
Hunger for security
Caught up in the mesh
Caught up for eternity
Hunger for the flesh
Hunger for security
Caught up in the mesh
Caught up for eternity
The river gently beckons
But the answer is no
Gripping their illusions
They cannot let them go
Hunger for the flesh
Leads them to a weaker heart
Mortals who imprison themselves
Let them have a new start
Let them have a new start
Hunger for the flesh
Hunger for security
Caught up in the mesh
Caught up for eternity
Hunger for the flesh
Hunger for security
Caught up in the mesh
Holding back the change
This song directly addresses the question of what matters and so of meaning, something apparent to the human being in most cases but not apparent in nature in general. If we ask this question only from our own personal perspective, and without wider context, it is our life and security that matters. But the wider you go and the more context you bring into this question the more our own personal meaning and value recedes. Currently, as I write, there are renewed waves of environmental concern for the earth in numerous directions. We have the campaign Extinction Rebellion on the one hand and, in the USA, politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talk of a “Green New Deal” which they imagine will remedy our planet’s environmental problems and allow (human) business as usual to carry on without dramatic and world-altering events occurring which may hinder our (self-) imagined progress.
Yet I, with a perhaps much wider context on the issues, that of nature as a whole as the system of all that is, ask myself what the worst that can happen actually is. This, it would seem to me, would be the entire destruction of life on earth, the essential neutralisation of life on our planet. I am told that this would be horrific and devastating and for those that are going away no doubt that might be true. But our planet, the only one any of us will likely ever have any direct experience of, is not even a pinprick in the totality of everything that exists. If we simply disappeared who would even be around to care? Would anything miss this planet? My point is that we humans are so small-minded. Our thought is not nearly big enough. Nature is much, much bigger than us. It is so beyond needing or requiring us to be around to direct it or fix it or even be a part of it. So I’m totally on board with that part of George Carlin’s act in the past where he spoke of “human arrogance” towards nature as if its purpose was us. We have a big shock coming if we continue to believe such nonsensical things. But then we have that same big shock coming one day anyway. Nature is not really into permanence. Its much more into change. So don’t “grip your illusions” too tightly. You can’t “hold back the change”.
And so the question returns again once more, as it always seems to: what are we and what is our place in all this? The metaphor of The Matrix returns again, too. The One played a role in a system. Even in the end, in that last conversation between The Architect and The Oracle, it was suggested that real world changes would not last forever. It was a tacit acknowledgement, of course, that nothing ever does. For millions of years our own planet existed and we did not. We appear and then imagine this planet is “our’s” like New World colonialists claiming land not our’s is now our own. But what then is the role of human beings in the system that is nature? It is, as it can only ever be, to be what we are. This cannot be sugar-coated. While some paint us as the altruistic ones who are easily led astray, others, perhaps characters in films such as Agent Smith from The Matrix, describe humans as “a virus”. Yet, at the end of the day, whether altruists or viruses, we are insignificant and the ‘matrix’ that is our planet can easily be shut down and made into something else by nature. It will be anyway. It is inevitable. In this, nature teaches us humility. It also teaches us limitation. It teaches us constraint and circumstance and consequence. It teaches us, in fact, that we need nature but it does not necessarily need us. As The Architect says to Neo in sinister fashion: “There are losses we are prepared to accept”. Nature, we should be in no doubt, would be able to take the loss of us and our planet. It wouldn’t even raise a hint of recognition that we had disappeared.
In this way, we can see an egotistical and narcissistic set of human cultures as ways to recreate nature or as new natures we attempt to create more under our control. The overarching thing humans seem to care about is control whether of each other or over nature. As transhumanists try to invent ways to live forever and technocrats try to plug people into an electronic world they increasingly cannot exist without, this reveals a human blindness: that human beings are not in control of nature! In truth, human beings are engulfed and overwhelmed by nature even as they are, moment by moment, subject to its all-powerful constraints. We are one volcanic eruption away from a year of worldwide winter even as we are one asteroid strike away from extinction even as we stand one disease or accident away from death. Nature is a place of eternal consequence and the human beings who have used their nature to pursue cultures of control inevitably end up fearing being controlled themselves the most. We see this too in Neo’s reaction to The Architect when told, in The Matrix Reloaded, that he is merely a function of the system. “Bullshit! I don’t believe it!” he is heard to say. But it is true nevertheless. Yet the matrix that is nature does not care about our feelings or opinions on the matter. It just works as it can. And, unlike The Matrix, you cannot argue with nature. Nature is never wrong. Nature is innocent of knowing. Nature is innocent of thinking. Nature is guilt-free. Nature is, thus, due human reverence as something transcendent far above it yet also as something far more immanent than we could ever be. If we want a source, that is it. Nature is the way of all things, what a Taoist would call ‘the Tao’. It is this way we humans need to acknowledge, respect and attune ourselves to - as we recognise when we take time out to appreciate the sunshine, be inhabited by the feeling of a particular view, cuddle an animal and feel the natural communion of touch or sit in the shade of a particular tree. That should be the normal, not the exceptional. The normal is not human control but human acceptance in humility of its place in an anarchic harmony of all things.
Yet when we think of nature we will perhaps more immediately think of things such as animal cruelty or vegetarianism and veganism or the extinction of individual species. We will be told, with a straight face, that, for example, extinction of species is very serious as if nature itself was weeping when the truth is that it was nature itself which created the possibility and enabled and allowed it to happen through its own special agents: us! (Although it is also true to say that things will go extinct whether we exist or not. Always have, always will!) Yes, it is human beings which created pain, evil, suffering and misery. Other things can hurt, perhaps more than we can know, but they do not feel these specifically human things no matter how much they do. This, in case you are wondering, is not to be callous or indifferent to the sufferings of others. I still think and believe we should aim to reduce examples of all of these things even though I do not think I can claim ‘nature’ as my mandate to do such a thing. It is, I think, more to do with nature’s gift of the instinct to survive and to prosper all things in the furtherance of that same gift as much as we can and to the best of our own ability. Yet nature does not implore us to be vegans. Nature does not stop us killing for food while creating thousands of other creatures that prey upon each other for survival. Nature is not a human being and its interpretation is not to be given in human language, thought or emotions.
It comes to this: nothing has to exist. That which exists exists because it can and it may very easily go away again because it can as well. Nature is fragile, contingent, changing, flexible about its arrangements. There are questions about which bits are and aren’t necessary at any given time - although nature itself knows nothing of time and time is irrelevant to it. Nature swallows time as it swallows being and non-being before regurgitating them back out again. As beings of nature, formed from nothing, we need nature to exist, both from an originary standpoint but also from a sustaining and maintaining standpoint. There is a reason people feel more alive ‘in nature’. Yet nature doesn’t need us. We should never forget who is the real boss and what it is that gives us the free gift of life in a commonwealth of all things that exist without reason. This, I imagine, is why some spiritual traditions engage in silent meditation. Nature speaks, yet without words. As human beings, we need to find ways to mimic nature in this and many other ways in which it operates and, I would maintain, for our own good as long as we are to survive.
I finish this section of my essay, enigmatically, with yet more lyrics from a Howard Jones song. This time the song is “Hide and Seek”:
There was a time when there was nothing at all
Nothing at all, just a distant hum
There was a being and he lived on his own
He had no one to talk to, and nothing to do
He drew up the plans,
learnt to work with his hands
A million years passed by and his work was done
And his words were these...
Hope you find it in everything,
everything that you see
Hope you find it in everything,
everything that you see
Hope you find it, hope you find it
Hope you find me in you
So she had built her elaborate home
With its ups and its downs,
its rains and its sun
She decided that her work was done,
time to have fun
and found a game to play
Then as part of the game
She completely forgot where she'd hidden herself
And she spent the rest of her time
Trying to find the parts
Hope you find it in everything,
everything that you see
Hope you find it in everything,
everything that you see
Hope you find it, hope you find it
Hope you find me in you
There was a time when there was nothing at all, nothing at all
Just a distant hum
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