Faith in Nature

What does nature mean? To be in nature, in touch with the physical environment, semantically connotates the natural environment, replete with all the untramelled, untamed majesty of the wild. We picture windows of the globe, untouched by the hand of civilization, where animals and plants live in peaceful union, where the sound of silence fills the lungs, where the atmosphere is clearer, and the soul lies down in the long green grass, where even belief means nothing at all.

 Source: Wikicommons

With the processes of globalization and development, we find these corners become slithers, lit by the glory of nature but shadowed by the walls of man. To be in nature is to be in the urban sprawl. The wild is precious and rare, quantifiable and vulnerable, especially for the city-dweller.  That is not to say it does not exist, nor that its experience is not as tangible as it was pre-settlement. It is to say, however, that nature as a concept and a reality is imbued with a sense of man’s entitlement to it and ownership of it. The feeling that man can quantify and own the land, can tame the wild, and can manipulate the natural form, is assumed as base human extinct and right.

What does this say of man’s relationship to the natural world? Is it too tarnished with the brush of post-Enlightenment rationalism and scientism? Has nature become a child of human understanding, something that we are to grapple with, contemplate and dominate? Even in its preservation we own it. We own it in the green political movements. We own it in clean up Australia day. We own it in the organic produce we buy. We own it every time we quantify its wildness and draw it out of the untouched and into the social.

Is this the attitude that underpins the growth of human rationalism at the expense of metaphysical belief? Perhaps. That does not mean, however, that there is no place for metaphysics, or for the wild, or for faith. It simply involves a re-conception of it.

I sit in merlos, a coffeeshop that borders the manicured edges ‘Great Court’ of the University of Queensland, its own slither of green amidst the towering sandstone of academia. A single tree forms the centre of the courtyard, which students flock to, and cue to be a part of as they sip their soy lattes and sweat over final exams. This is man’s place, but it owes its value to its relationship with nature. The branches canopy the space; they create the space, sheltering the tables from the elements. It reminds us of its presence too, every time the wind blows through the pages of a textbook, or a fly lands on a saucer to sip droplets of chai.

Man’s space could exist without nature, and nature would certainly flourish without man. But does a tree make a sound if it falls in a wood and no one is there to hear it? The two create a sacred union of their own; one which reminds us that we should stretch our minds and our physical capabilities to develop our natural environment. It is a union which tells us that there is something more than us, that we should seek to understand, but that we cannot ostensibly control. We exist in something bigger than ourselves. Nature’s word is final and ultimate. Our spaces take on significance because of their ability to account for nature, and to be one with nature.  This is faith.

As I write a bird relieves itself on the computer. Faith will have the final say.