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Abundance is the natural state of the world. If you leave something alone, there is enough, plenty in fact for all. Anyone who thinks that life is a competitive battlefield filled with individuals struggling, clawing at each other to survive needs to get outside more.
That's not what life is and the first time you sit still and listen to the forest, pause in a grassy meadow in the moonlight, or tk you'll realize our conception of the world as struggle is flat wrong. It's flat wrong for many reasons, but the one that's come to interest me the most is that that boundary between individual and environment is not nearly so neat and clean as we imagine.
There is a harmonic resonance between the world and forms that make it up, a kind of vibrating, edge-blurring, feedback loop. Things move, change, do what they need to do, others dissolve, morph, recombine in new ways. Nothing is still, nothing is static, nothing is cut off from anything else. We're still not sure where a tree ends: is it the roots? The mats of fungi feeding nutrients to the roots, without which the tree would die? Where is the beginning and end?
The better question might be, why are we looking for these things? Where did we get the idea that things begin and end?
If you do pause somewhere and sit and be still and watch, listen, smell, taste, you'll also notice something very important: you are part of this harmonic dance going on around you. The grass presses against your feet, the gnats explore your skin, the carpenter bees' wings announce their arrival to you.
When we come to a place where the ecosystem is thriving we feel at peace
When we seperate ourselves from the ecosystem that abundance goes away.
Until we learn to love ourselves we can't fix anything, we can't be part of anything. We have to come to grips with who we are, how we fit into the larger picture. We need to see the ways in which we are part of ecosystems, we just have to change how we do it. We do not use things, we are in things.
Anyone who believes that life is a battlefield full of
individual warriors should go out into the meadows
on a spring night. There, you can learn that the
biosphere does not spawn cutoff, clearly
differentiated individuals who compete against one
another—assuming you find such a meadow; that is,
now that some farmers have started to sow a single,
standardized species of grass.
Such an experience of the harmony between a
landscape and its lifeforms is probably not the
result of objective analysis. But this is precisely the
point: If you let the calyxes and grasses slide
through your hands amid the firefly flurries,
celebrating the coming summer, you don’t just
perceive a multitude of other beings—the hundred
or so species of plants and countless insects that
make up the meadow’s ecosystem. You also
experience yourself as a part of this scene. And this
is probably the most powerful effect of experiences
in the natural world. When you immerse yourself in
the natural world, you wander a little through the
landscape of your soul.
For a long time now, such experiences have been
considered not very reliable, certainly unscientific,
and, if valid at all, deeply steeped in that pleasant
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