Note: See yesterday’s post.

My mother, to me, probably 50 years ago. “Why don’t you go to church anymore?”

Me: “Nature is my church.”

Mom, sarcastic: “Oh yeah, I’ve heard that one before.”

Actually, Mom, it’s true. I’m what is called a “pantheist,” having let go of Big Daddy God to experience divinity in the entire pulsing panorama of my experience in a 3D body on this planet Earth. This is “nature,” that is, the way things work, without human interference! Because they do! Inexorably. Relentlessly. The seasonality of nature is key; spring always follows winter, summer follows spring, autumn follows summer, and winter follows autumn. Birth, growth, maturity, aging, death. Like clockwork. Like our own bodies, which are a part of nature; each an antenna, connecting earth to sky.

Seasonality, whether of human bodies or any other living organism, IS a clock, a divine clock, and though we can point to Earth’s angled relationship to the Sun as the “cause,” that angled relationship too, is in relationship to all sorts oof other relationships that, at bottom, we cannot even hope to understand. Why? Because there is no bottom, no “bottom line” to nature. Bottom lines are what humans do; we truncate our explorations in order to not have to dig further down, to uncover ever deeper layers. In order to stop any scary “infinite regress,” we artificially decide “the buck stops here.”

In other words, we attempt to circumscribe Nature, to pretend she is a closed circle, the circumference of which serves as a barrier which we try to ignore, and beyond which we dare not go.

Nature is not a closed circle.

NATURE IS AN OPEN SYSTEM

No wonder all we can do is wonder — at how she “does it,” over and over again, each “time” a bit different, offering variety, and yet within a mutating framework that holds everything in place, in all its infinite, multivalent variety, “for the time being.”

Yes, my religion is Nature. Has been for over 50 years. And rather than fear her, I worship her, full of wonder inside her mysterious presence, yes; and what is wondrous is just how nature “works,” and the patterns she makes through space and time, spiralling through the seasons, all within a glacially shifting cosmic panorama. AND, oh my . . . this year, when I get out there, sitting on my stool with hands in the soil, I literally lose track of time, from which swoon, when done, I must startle myself awake.

Immersion in Nature enlivens this 79-year-old, much more than I can say. Up until this year, during the growing seasons I had spent about one hour per day outside, planting, weeding, mowing, designing, taking apart and putting together, in general; as I always say, “What we’re doing on this planet, is movin’ stuff around.” And, it’s corollary: ” . . .which is always an excuse for relationships.”  And not just with other human beings, but with whatever “stuff” I’m movin’ around!

That sounds simple-minded, I know. Actually, it’s the simple truth.

Once we climb back into our bodies, and move in our bodies in relationship with others, including not just humans, but animals, plants, water, sky, trees, etc., we cannot help but feel this extraordinary immersion into the natural, organic world that totally eclipses the isolation, the solipsism, into which we westerners have been indoctrinated.

So what’s happened this year is I’m outside fully two hours per day, movin’ stuff around, immersed in the NOW, listening to bird calls, watching insects scurry, feeling plants wave in the breeze, sun dappling through clouds scudding through the heavens; all of it, all of it, I am a drunkard, I simply cannot get enough.

Plus, I remain convinced that this focus, this focus on full-on absorption and expression of the mystery, the beauty, the sheer unfathomability of the natural world, is exactly what we need to break the spell of AI, the technocratic, transhumanist, robotic agenda “they” have in store for us. No matter what maps we make that pretend to capture nature, the map is never the territory. And that goes for words, language too. Another map. That I would make a stab in that direction linguistically here, to at least attempt to invoke the swooning divinity that I feel my entire self immersed in, is a joke. It cannot be done.

Don’t be surprised if all you get from me for the next little while is one meme a day. My focus is elsewhere, for the time being.