Wilderness and Chaos
We live in a world of rigid order run by external forces. People seem to control us, telling us what we can and cannot do, when we can act and when we must wait. We feel forced to conform in every way, with sanctions for when we behave in some way other than what’s acceptable. So we find places that we feel are safer, places there are no humans to make us conform, and we romanticize them. Currently what we romanticize is the wilderness, a place of unimaginable potential and believed safety.
However, this belief of nature as some kind of romantic safe place is incredibly incorrect and historically inaccurate. Our ancestors never worshipped the wilderness. Indeed, they feared it. The idea of worshipping nature as a being to be loved is a completely modern idea, and one usually done from the safety of civilization, or the ability to return to it quickly.
Nature is harsh. When we rely upon the weather, we realize that the moods of the Earth can be quite deadly and are completely impersonal. The planet does not care if we live or die, if we eat of other being’s lives or feed the animals with our still-living body. We believe that we’re different, that we’re special to nature itself, but there’s no reason to believe that other than the conceit of viewpoint.
We romanticize what is separate from us, what we see as pure. That doesn’t make it true. When we separate ourselves from our reality, and view nature as better than the world we actually live in, we lose a great chance to actually affect our own world. We’ve already written it off as impure, profane as opposed to sacred. And that which is profane is something which cannot be improved, only destroyed or hidden from.
We deny our own nature when we deny the world we live in, when we try to recreate reality to degrade the world we live in. It cannot serve us, only cost us dearly. We must learn to accept the world of humanity as sacred as well as the world outside of ourselves, for truly, we are part of nature anyway. The dichotomy is false.
Questions:
Why do you think we try to separate ourselves and our world from the natural world?
Why is the Earth impersonal? Why do we believe otherwise?
What happens when we deny the sacredness of our own surroundings?
However, this belief of nature as some kind of romantic safe place is incredibly incorrect and historically inaccurate. Our ancestors never worshipped the wilderness. Indeed, they feared it. The idea of worshipping nature as a being to be loved is a completely modern idea, and one usually done from the safety of civilization, or the ability to return to it quickly.
Nature is harsh. When we rely upon the weather, we realize that the moods of the Earth can be quite deadly and are completely impersonal. The planet does not care if we live or die, if we eat of other being’s lives or feed the animals with our still-living body. We believe that we’re different, that we’re special to nature itself, but there’s no reason to believe that other than the conceit of viewpoint.
We romanticize what is separate from us, what we see as pure. That doesn’t make it true. When we separate ourselves from our reality, and view nature as better than the world we actually live in, we lose a great chance to actually affect our own world. We’ve already written it off as impure, profane as opposed to sacred. And that which is profane is something which cannot be improved, only destroyed or hidden from.
We deny our own nature when we deny the world we live in, when we try to recreate reality to degrade the world we live in. It cannot serve us, only cost us dearly. We must learn to accept the world of humanity as sacred as well as the world outside of ourselves, for truly, we are part of nature anyway. The dichotomy is false.
Questions:
Why do you think we try to separate ourselves and our world from the natural world?
Why is the Earth impersonal? Why do we believe otherwise?
What happens when we deny the sacredness of our own surroundings?
posted by Vieva @ 3:35 PM
3 Comments:
At 1:47 PM,
Star said…
Hm. You made me think before I got past the first paragraph. Meanie! ;) About safety and the perception of it, and how that relates not just to the literal wilderness we call "nature", but also to what I consider to be safe "places". That proably bears expanding on elsewhere rather than cluttering up your comment space here... Maybe that will be my spiriblog entry for today... If, you know, I could get myself to concentrate a little more. It's very much an "ooo! shiny!" day.
Questions:
1. Originally? I don't know. Now? I think we're conditioned to see ourselves as seperate, outside of nature. It's how society thinks, and we absorb that attitude as we grow up around it. Also, we like to have control over our enviroment. Dividing it into "nature" and "not nature" allows us some little bit of control, and it allows us a huge amount of control over the part that is not nature because it belongs to us.
2. The Earth is impersonal because it's a big ball of rock and dirt. It is not a living, sentient organism. I think we try to make it personal because it is such a big part of our lives (we live on it, after all) and it's so complex that it seems like it should be a person. Except that doesn't really follow...
3. I think... I don't think that we automatically classify our surroundings as "profane" when we decide that they are not sacred. There's a lot of neutral space between the two. I think many people don't see the world around us as profane so much as just not-sacred. When that happens (working from the assumption that the world around us is sacred), I would tend to say that a lot of energy gets wasted, burned up in trying to make it sacred. I think also that even if it's not "profane" as such, there's more of a tendency to think that we don't have to take such good care of the world around us if it's not sacred. After all, it's just everyday stuff, nothing special; who cares if we get a little messy with it? And that's dangerous, since we don't exactly have anywhere else to go (yet) if we screw up this planet.
At 3:19 PM,
Vieva said…
ha! made you think, made you think! :)
shiny? oooh .. shiny ...
and you better work on that blog of yours, or I'm gonna nag. :)
At 3:34 PM,
Star said…
Yes, Mom, in just a...
OOooooo, what's THAT over THERE?
(This afternoon I actually do have a good excuse; I did have to do stuff for work, which, you know, since I'm *at* work right now...)
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