Someone asked: what does Nature mean to you? So I have been thinking about all the ways I have interacted with nature during the course of my nearly six decades on the planet, but more especially during the shifts of the last four years.
There have been two years of 'shift' for humanity as a whole, but my personal shift started in 2018 – and I find it increasingly hard to understand how long ago that was and how quickly the intervening time has passed. I am astonished both at how much has changed and at how little.
I often wonder if the changes I see and feel in my life and in myself are even visible on the outside. I wonder whether the people who have watched me navigate these years see any difference in me now, or whether this is purely my own perception. To me they feel real, and yet – to me – they also feel more like a reversion, a step back towards my better self rather than a climbing into somenotion of a higher self.
When I feel truly connected, to myself, to the planet, to my vision, to the people I care about, I am always struck by specific memories of other times when I felt that way. I remember a tree-lined road from a cliff-top to a beach in Wales. It doesn't seem to be there anymore. I remember sitting on the groynes near Selsey when I can't have been more than 10 or 11 years old. I remember being in the hills with my Dad, in my teens and twenties, and in the much higher hills with a lovely group of strangers in my forties and fifties.
So although part of me feels I have significantly shifted in my world view, in my attitude, in my day-to-day doing-ness, another part of me knows that all I have really done is to unearth the core, the essence of who I have always been and given her permission to take centre stage.
What has all this got to do with what Nature means to me? Nature is the doorway. All of the times I have felt and still feel most connected to myself, the natural world (as we call it, as if any part of the world is in any true sense 'un-natural') has been the key to unlocking the experience.
To answer the question more succinctly:
Nature means that I'm never alone, never abandoned, never lost.
Nature means I always have a home, a safe space where I will be nurtured and nourished and welcome.
Nature means I will never lack inspiration, motivation, a reason for being.
Nature means I will always have a playmate, a helpmeet, a friend.
Nature is proof of my uniqueness and my ordinariness, it is my uplift and my grounding, my place in the sacred and my role in reality. Nature is both how and why I am alive.
We speak of Nature, of Mother Nature, as if she were separate, somehow 'other' – but she is not. She is us and we are her. We are always in Nature just as she is always in us. Mother and child. Lover and beloved. Sibling, sister, source.
To ask of me what does 'Nature' mean is to ask what it means to breathe, to move, to think. It is to wonder what it means to imagine, to create, to be grateful. It is to ponder who and what and why I am.
Nature does not have to mean anything to me. Nature just is.
And so am I.
And that is the most magical miraculous thing.
