Romancing Nature—Part 2

Real nature can be scary—rather than cute and cuddly. To our deep ancestors, nature was an awesome place that called for a healthy level of fear—not what is imagined as the “Peaceable Kingdom,” where the lion reposes compliantly with the lamb. Our ancestors understood nature in its “red in tooth and claw” quality. In our attempts to enforce our dominion over the world, we have domesticated it and largely eradicated our fear and awe.

Thus we have people wandering through the wilderness, coming upon a grizzly bear and trying to get close for a photograph. So we read in the news about another person killed by a bear, and wonder if something should be done about it. Many people are unaware of the various kinds of parasites who invade a critter and slowly and painfully kill their host. This is not the kind of nature we want to hear about.

We have done our best to terminate what we perceive to be animal-to-animal cruelty in nature, while at the same time overlooking our cruelty toward it and each other. We have interfered with God’s sacred world and imposed our misplaced values on it.

If, on the other hand, we were to open ourselves to the reality of nature, we could not only see its beauty, but also what’s not cozy out there: the scary predators, the violent deaths, the scavengers who feast on dead bodies, the nasty parasites, etc. We could learn to accept these unpleasant realities, along with the enchanting antics of birds, chipmunks, and other cute critters. When we come to understand that we are a part of the natural world and that it’s a world containing both peace and killing, we can see the wholeness and realize that nature is sacred and beautiful in its own right. We don’t need to romance or idealize it. We don’t need to force it to conform to some fictitious and gentle image that we’ve created.

Our ancestors were in close touch with real nature. They dealt with threatening predators, as they simultaneously felt a sense of peace and awe. It was not a nature stripped of its threats, or of their immediacy and deep connection to it. We can reacquire our ancestors’ awe of nature, as well as thrill to its beauty and serenity. We can learn to appreciate its wholeness—by getting back in touch with it, by dropping our idealized picture and opening to the complete story. It’s both tame and wild.