We’re in a time unlike any other, when so many of humankind’s collective choices are coming into question. As an animist I’ve been able to find strength by placing my focus on the law of nature. Those archetypal, inescapable, eternal truths. This incarnation of man cannot continue to live out of balance with nature, and whether from this crisis or the next, our way of life will have to change. We have no choice but to submit to her law. 

For a long time, I’ve gone into nature to find sanity in this insane culture. What I’ve found there has not always been comforting. I’ve learned that the “real” world hiding behind our artificial one is not simply the idyllic paradise we project onto her. It is not simply a realm of fantasy, the garden of Eden from where our “logical” way of thinking has expelled us. Although it is all these things.

But neither is the law of nature simply “tooth and claw,” survival of the fittest. This is also a modern human projection. Cooperation, not competition, is the natural way of life. Nature is a living manifestation of harmony. A symphony of the divine: a theophany. 

Spend time in nature and make an effort to abandon the thought patterns, the judgements and discernments that constitute our culture’s “life-way,” and you’ll see exactly what I mean. The selfishness of the one dissolves into the mangnanimosity of the perfect whole. Nature beseeches us to surrender ourselves to her beauteous theophany; the more we fight her the more we suffer. It is at that point we realize there is no death, except in death’s season, which is inevitably followed by new life. Life is never lost, it is renewed. That is the law of nature. 

As we are bombarded by fear from the thoughts around us, I invite you to tune that crystal radio of the mind to a different frequency; that of the natural world. To perceive this current situation from the perspective of the dynamic world that came before all this:

There is celebration this spring. That omniscient sky roar has suddenly subsided! All over the planet, the feverish onslaught of the smoke of man’s fires is dissipating and clean, life-giving atmosphere is returning. Peace and calm descends over man’s concrete trails; families have joined together in their burrows, practicing togetherness and the art of “being”. Mother nature, in her infinite intelligence, has figured out a way to protect us all, to cleanse herself – not of humans, but, ingeniously, human madness. Mankind is not being punished – they are being sidelined. Something has made the humans stop their frenetic insanity, and blessed be, it’s not a colossal explosion. Now, if they can only turn away from their self-obsession, the quiet will allow them to hear us again!

And they are talking to us. The birds, the cactus, the earth honoring ancestors who understand these things. Blessed, re-awakened soul, please join our theophany again.