(All images by Dale Barrigar)
“You’re soft as glass / and I’m a gentleman / and we’ve got the sky to talk about / and the world to lie upon.” – Townes Van Zandt
Getting back to nature is not what most people think it is and this MISUNDERSTANDING causes too many people to not get back to nature when getting back to nature is probably the single most important thing many of us could ever do right now.
Too many people believe that “getting back to nature” equals what Ubiquitous Advertising (and now social media in all its octopus-like tentacles and forms) has told them it is.
In order to get back to nature, you do not need to purchase expensive hiking boots and a new backpack and the right clothes and the right walking stick so that you look like you are a nature buff.
You do not need to climb Mount Everest or fly on one of “their” toxic airplanes to a “nature” destination that is filled with tourists just like you.
You do not need to swim to the bottom of the sea nor hike back into the literal wilderness so far so that you do not see any other humans for forty days or more and end up dying of starvation.
You do not need to purchase a mountain bike; do not need to buy rock-climbing equipment; do not need to buy expensive guns in order to slaughter animals with, or a boat so you can hunt down fish; nor do you need to purchase a jeep; a surf board; or a tent and camping gear, in order to get back to nature.
If you are outside right now, glance up into the sky and really notice it and what it’s doing right now; then step to the nearest green thing around you (even if it’s been made that way by humans) and notice how this green plant grows and interacts with its environment, giving back good and taking bad out (you can FEEL this around a plant if you want to). We wouldn’t be here at all without them.
If you are inside, move to the nearest window somehow and open it if you can. If you can’t, it’s okay. Study what is happening in and through the window, whether it be sun, clouds, night, moonlight or starlight or whatever the light (from the sky) is doing.
Even if you couldn’t open the window, you have gotten back to nature when you noticed (and engaged with) the natural light (or its opposite, darkness); and the natural light is always there, even when it’s combined with a human-caused light, which is, after all, also part of nature, because humans are part of nature.
If you can’t move right now, turn away from what they call “the world” and enter so deeply into yourself that the world falls away and there is nothing but self, so much so that “the self” disappears – and you realize that you have been here all along and always will be even after whatever else happens happens. (And it is going to happen anyway whether you like it or not. This is part of what they mean when they say, “Let it be.”)
Nietzsche famously wrote, “Stare into the abyss long enough and the abyss will stare back into you.”
Most people misunderstand that quotation and think it’s a negative, and terrifying, thing.
It’s actually the most positive thing one could ever hope to imagine.
Dale Barrigar
