The Way of

nature. The incredible power of nature was recently re-thrust upon me.
I have been aware of the immense power of the natural for quite some time. As a matter of fact, I remember the first time its immensity was thrust upon me—I was in New Zealand, lost in the bush, surrounded by mountains, and crying because I didn’t know which way to go. Once you have been humbled by nature, even just once, you recognize it, forever afterwards, as the predominant power on the planet.
For example, so much talk these days is revolving around the greenhouse effect and what we’re doing to “destroy” the planet. Nobody seems to think about the fact that all we’re doing is creating an environment that is inhospitable to human life. The planet heats up a few degrees, the polar ice caps melt, there is massive flooding, and the end result is simply that the planet takes a blow.
We cannot stop the earth from rotating. We cannot stop the earth from revolving around the sun. This is the bigger nature that we forget about, I think. In our hubris and naiveté we believe that what we have built is the best part of nature, but the fact of the matter is that almost everything humans have built defies nature. Wal-Mart strikes me as one of the most absolutely nature defying edifices in the world. Convenient or not, it seems slightly unnatural that you can go to a building and get fruits, vegetables, frozen fruits, frozen vegetables, canned fruits, canned vegetables, dried fruits, aerosol cans full of things that smell like fruits, fruit of the loom underwear, fruit decorated wastebaskets, orange hunting vests, berry vine seeds.
Granted, I’m taking a somewhat super-naturalistic point of view in terms of nature. In other words, I’m thinking about it in terms of what I have seen and experienced while spending days in the mountains where it can sometimes be a mission to find the next stream and collect some water. And let me tell you that if you don’t have food with you, finding food in nature can be a painstaking task if you don’t know what you’re doing.
All our most revered structures will collapse one day: the stock market, the government, society, and, eventually, mankind. That is the way of nature when you attempt to control it. It is slow, patient, and willing to take a lot of punishment, but, in the end, it will always manage to overcome.
Futures are perpetually unknowable… this is a fact it isn’t even worth debating any more. So, it is entirely possible that we were meant to develop like this. It is entirely possible that nature pushed us in this direction so that we would destroy ourselves. Perhaps the great wheel of existence saw that this particular creature was pushing the boundaries of goodness and needed to be flexed in a direction that would eventually put it out of the world’s misery. I guess I am thinking here of an enormous tree that looks so strong from the outside, but inside is little more than a hollow, ready to be pushed over by a strong wind.
There are only two options these days: fight the fight against the unfathomable structures of humanity and attempt to get people to turn away from their greed-mongering, stuff accumulation, and (to be frank) comforts—which seems a little bit like attempting to hold the ocean back with a spoon—or suck it all up, squirt it into a drying purulent vein, and pray that the end isn’t too painful. Has it gone too far? Do we still think we can conquer nature? When was the last time you climbed a mountain? What good are guns and bombs against the methodical march of rivers and magma?