Nature (the natural!) is the setting for our humanity. Being attentive to one’s presence near the natural generates joy.
Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,”
There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
Rachel Carson.
“The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with every petal, […] The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live.” – Richard Jefferies
via Popova
The natural world can offer us more than the means to survive, on the one hand, or mortal risks to be avoided, on the other: it can offer us joy.
[…]There can be occasions when we suddenly and involuntarily find ourselves loving the natural world with a startling intensity, in a burst of emotion which we may not fully understand, and the only word that seems to me to be appropriate for this feeling is joy.
[…]we need constantly reminding that we have been operators of computers for a single generation and workers in neon-lit offices for three or four, but we were farmers for five hundred generations, and before that hunter-gatherers for perhaps fifty thousand or more
[…]It is time for a different, formal defence of nature. We should offer up not just the notion of being sensible and responsible about it, which is sustainable development, nor the notion of its mammoth utilitarian and financial value, which is ecosystem services, but a third way, something different entirely: we should offer up what it means to our spirits; the love of it. We should offer up its joy.
The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, Michael McCarthy
