I Am Nature, and I Can Only Find Myself as a Part of It

We take birth from Earth, and we return to it for our eternal rest. It is in reconnection with our origin that we can find new beginnings.

Justyna Cyrankiewicz

Jul 05, 2024

Hi,

How are you this week? What do you yearn for?

Sunset in the Shetland Islands, Scotland (1899) by William Trost Richards (American, 1833-1905)

“Earth, our home. The place of our history. A tiny point in time, which ticks towards one’s own demise. It is slow enough to allow the birth of the most beautiful thing in the universe—life. That life is nature.”

— Nikola Horvat-Tesla, an author of a widely popular online documentary titled “Why I Hike?.”

We’ve grown estranged from nature, both collectively and individually. Our modern ways of living, through convenience and overindulgence, have become an inoculation against the simple fulfilment and serenity offered by the wilderness.

This separation leaves a gaping hole in us, one from which rivers of sorrow flow out into our lives, affecting our minds and hearts in ways that escape the grasp of our consciousness.

The homeland of nature

Growing up, my Babcia (Polish for Grandma) taught me to hug birches, placing my bare feet at their roots, and inviting their healing energy into my body. She wouldn’t explain much, and I never asked. There was no need for words. I felt with my whole being that what we were participating in was something profoundly important, if not the most important of all things I could be participating in as a 5- or 6-year-old. Before knowing how to navigate life, I was already taught how to return home.

We would roam into the forest, Babcia and I, sometimes to look for blueberries, other times simply to “breathe in the forest”, as she likes to say, but we’d always, eventually, arrive in the birch’s arms. “Take your shoes off,” Babcia’s soft wisdom would ordain, and we’d both place our bare feet on the world’s muddy floor, blanketed with fields of fresh moss and generations of fallen leaves. We would then stand on the opposite sides of the birch trunk, reach our arms forward, and wrap them around its firm body so that ours, soft, can align closely to it. Standing like this, we’d sway gently with the wind, the three bodies of ours, and we’d feel at peace.

Those childhood moments were so wide and deep that they lasted to this day. They sustain me from inside out even when I’m far from the forest; as John O’Donohue once reflected: “there is a way in which the outer presence [of nature], even through memory or imagination, can be brought inward as a sustaining thing.”

I spent my childhood traversing Polish forests and fields, jumping over the wild, quick creeks cutting through the fresh greenery and plush of early spring grass. When I wasn’t at school, I was observing frogs, tadpoles, fishes, birds, grasshoppers, and—if they chose to lift the curtain of their mystery—foxes and roe deer emerging from the forest into the wideness of the meadow and my eyes. I would curiously track the trotting of a wild paw across the wet forest floor, and I would submerge my hands in the cold forest streams all the way to the bottom, always yearning to be closer to nature, to feel its damp touch directly on my skin.

Where would I stand today if my feet, stepping alone out of the struggle to make friends at school, didn’t lead me, over and over again, between the trees? How would I look if I didn’t dip my face into the lakes of grass, or place my cheek against the soft mossy pillow, and lie as still as a rock, trying to learn its mossy ways? How would I be without learning the tender love circling through my body like the juices flowing through the body of a tree I was hugging barefoot? I don’t know. I have been returning to their embrace since I can remember.

And yet, there has come a time when I became estranged from nature, too. I’ve gotten lost in myself and the world, and for some time, I forgot my way home. Depression, a borrowed aspiration for a grand career, and a promise of city life, sticky and sweaty like the bodies filling it densely on a summer night, all led me astray from the homeland of nature. For those few empty years, I forgot to hold the birch tree in my arms and, by extension, I forgot to hold myself.

Crossing the riverbeds of sorrow

The emptiness that opened within me during those years gave way to a kind of sorrow I hadn’t known before. A loss of something integral to me, for which I had no name or useful thought that could help me conceptualise it. It is something that many of us feel, and increasingly so, as the Earth which gave birth to our lives, now struggles to sustain her own.

Francis Weller articulates this vague yet intimate, sense of loss in his book “The Wild Edge of Sorrow”. There, he writes about the five Gates of Grief, which, as he puts it, are different ways in which “sorrow carves riverbeds into our souls, deepening us as it flows in and out of our lives.”

I have written about one of those Gates leading from the places that have never known love in my recent essay, “Give up the Urge to Control, and Let the Body Be the Prayer.” Another source of grief, the sorrows of the world, is the sense of loss which spilled out of the empty places in me that were denied the closeness of the birch skin. These kinds of sorrows “are the daily reminders of the diminishing of species, habitats, and cultures, that consciously and unconsciously affect our psyche,” explains Weller.

We might not know the name of the sorrow that we hold deep in our beings, but it can still affect us daily. It’s the constant anticipation of our body, heart, and mind, to receive what they have been awaiting since birth. As psychiatrist R.D. Laing reminds us, we come to this world as stone-age children, expecting a lifelong engagement with the natural world, only to find ourselves separated in an artificial one, suffering from what eco-philosopher Richard Louv calls a ‘nature deficit disorder’.

This all leaves us with a feeling of an “aching echo in our bodies,” as Weller describes it, of something we don’t even know the name of, but that is missing. “We are wired for the full experience and encounter that our deep-time ancestors had,” he continues to explain, “which was namely tribal or village life on a consistent basis, participation with nature on a consistent basis, rituals to deal with the movement and transitions of life: the losses, the gratitudes, the healing. That’s what we expected, and almost none of that materialised.”

Instead of living in harmony with nature, we control and dominate it, depleting its resources for personal gain. As our separation from the natural world grows, so does the gaping hole within our beings. The riverbeds carved in our soles become so deep and wide that we might be unable to cross them on our own. What this grief calls of us is a collective return to our roots, to our very nature.

Rebirthing to, and from, what we are

It should be no surprise that nature stems from Latin origins meaning to be born. It is there that we all come from, and it is in its embrace that we can find redemption, rebirth, and renewal. The wild might offer us the wisdom of new beginnings, but we must first carve out the time and create the space to truly observe and listen.

We must slow down to re-attune to the rhythm of life. “Life should be slow; it should be giving us time as something precious. Life in the wilderness provides exactly that—slowness, focus on what matters, transcendence. Here time is a partner whispering not to be afraid of impermanence,” says Nikola Horvat-Tesla in his documentary. As we stop running, we can become steady enough to see new pathways within ourselves—and step anew with wisdom.

When I moved to Portugal almost a month ago, I rented a place by a beautiful trail, lined with eucalyptus trees whose scent hovered gently in the air, welcoming in its embrace all kinds of bodies that submerged in it—either passing by or sprouting from the soil. I would visit it a couple of times a day, each time feeling like I was returning home. Now I live further away, and it calls me in my dreams. I see myself walking its paths, touching the leaves surrounding it, and saying hello to the flowers sprinkled around the meadows and across the forest floor. I recognised them as integral to me, and in return, they gave me pieces of myself back.

“I think it makes a huge difference, when you wake in the morning and come out of your house, whether you believe you’re walking into a dead geographical location, which is used to get to a destination, or whether you’re emerging out into a landscape that is just as much if not more alive as you, but in a totally different form, and if you go towards it with an open heart and a real, watchful reverence, that you will be absolutely amazed at what it will reveal to you,” said beautifully John O’Donohue in an interview with Krista Tippett for On Being.

I also visit the beach, as I live on the ocean shore. I always go to the furthest edge of it, where it’s just me, my little dog, the waves, the cliffs, and the sand. I lay flat on it without a towel or blanket, because I want to feel it as close as possible. Tiny rocks stick to my skin, and I am not very particular in cleaning them off before heading back to my house. I like to bring the outer spaces into the indoor ones. So I climbed a tall pile of stones by a cliff wall, searching for rocks I could borrow and take home with me. I found two perfect ones, and they now sit on my desk as I write this. I will return them back to the beach when the time comes for me to leave. For now, they are here, and they help me feel at home.

When we venture into the wilderness, many of us feel that we are returning to a familiar place—a place we belong. Held in the embrace of nature, we can recognise our own. As Nikola Horvat-Tesla points out, “it is fundamental, not just for my own good, but for the good of my environment, that I discover myself, that I see myself as nature. I am nature, and can only find myself as part of it.”

The life living itself

I let my body carry particles of sand back home; I bring stones and eucalyptus branches found on cut-down trees alongside the trail; I walk around barefoot, climb trees, allow my hands to become dirty from playing with soil, let my cheek carry an imprint of the tree’s bark, and I lay flat on the sand without a towel or a blanket because I no longer see an alternative way of living.

It is not something I do with premeditation, or what my mind came up with. It is what the life throbbing in my body calls for, and the calling is so strong that whenever I ignore it, the consequences are acutely felt. I am rewilding my life because staying in an artificial, sterile, convenient, and isolating version of it would deplete me of everything that I consider worthwhile. I let my life live itself according to its deepest wisdom.

Touching the expressions of nature’s becoming, something in me moves up and says, “This, too, is what I am; I function in cycles, I am capable of rebirth.” It helps me to recognise what I’m made of, and where I belong over and over again. It’s a return to the ancestral ways of living. A reunion with that which the stone-age child in me yearns for. A tending to the wound of loss from which the dark waters of grief pour into my life. In everyday life, it means bringing back the conditions in which I feel most alive.

Quentin Septer

described in his recent essay how he and his wife, Daniela, tried to save a dying houseplant by recreating the conditions in which it has evolved to live. He then goes on to explain how they learned to offer the same kind of care and nourishment to themselves: “We try to eat healthy, natural foods. We try to spend time outside, to move our bodies, to stay in tune with the rhythms of the natural world. We try to cultivate and maintain close relationships with family members and friends. We try not to neglect the animals that we are, and what our bodies, minds, and souls need — what our own nature demands of us.”

Reuniting with the ancestral ways of living means reuniting with the place all of life took birth from: Earth. “Life emerged from Earth, it’s an extension of Earth, it loops back to transform the planet, explains Ferris Jabr, author of “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life.” “Together, Earth and life form a single living and evolving system. We are extensions and expressions of the planet, not just inhabitants on a spaceship Earth or a thin layer of life that is clinging to this larger inanimate entity.”

We emerge from the soil and find our eternal rest in it. Let us walk on it with reverence. Let each of our steps remind us of where we come from, and where we belong. Let the bare skin of our soles kiss the moist skin of the Earth. And finally, let us recognise that the flesh which envelopes us doesn’t separate us from the natural world; it unites us with it, for it’s made of the same particles that all life was formed from in the entire universe. We are nature, and we can only find ourselves as a part of it. Children, let us go home.

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