I want to feel what the cedars feel, and I want to know what they know
2025-02-01 permalink
From Who Am I? Psychological exercises to develop self-understanding:
When the human world disappoints, it’s not unusual to turn to nature. But what specifically is it about nature that offers us consolation?
To the stoic philosophers of ancient Roma, it was the idea of inevitability - so explicit in the natural world - that appealed; the tide has to rise and fall according to the phrases of the moon; the bough of the tree has to bend when the wind blows; the lion has to hunt the gazelle. The swallow has to migrate. The laws of nature are fixed by forces no-one chooses but to which everything must submit. It is a strange relief to remind ourselves that broadly the same kind of inevitability applies to our own lives as well.
During the Tang dynasty, the Chinese poet Bai Juyi as he got older felt increasingly excluded from what he called ‘the world of youngsters’: he turned instead to nature for companionship. In one poem he writes:
Turning my head around, I ask a pair of rocks:
‘Can you keep company with an old man like myself?’
Although the rocks cannot speak,
They promise that we will be three friends
He sought out oddly-shaped, exposed rocks that had been dramatically weathered and eroded: time had made them more interesting.
In what ways, similar or different, does nature appeal to you?
…
I long to be in nature, because my eyes long to see far and wide. I long to be met by the smells of the forest. I long for the river to splash its body onto me. Does it cool my sweaty skin, does it jolt me awake with its freezing needles?
I suppose it lies in the never ending variation of sensations. The complete opposite of the horrors, the torture, of the white classroom. The never ending uncontrollable variations. How it is all just there, all the more beautiful precisely because no one has arranged it according to their own purposes. It is… natural.
Just like writing when it flows directly from the heart. Just how unplanned encounters are the most magical ones. How unplanned adventures stay with us forever. How cities and neighborhoods grow over time, gradually winding farther and farther into each other.
