What do you experience when you are in nature?

I love to work in my garden. Evening Primrose (in Dutch: Teunisbloem), shown on the photo, is a wild plant with yellow flowers, which open in the evening. It’s  one of the 70+ species of plants in my garden. After thirty years of careful tending, the garden has become a little habitat with a mix of wild and cultivated trees and plants. Quite a lot of wild bees and bumble bees visit the flowers. There is a big pond with pond plastic to hold everything together. The plants in it are originally coming from natural ditches in the area and the aquatic life has developed spontaneously. The young water salamanders leave the water to live at covered places on land. I come across them, when I work with my hands in the soil. Later in the year, they go back to the water to mate. The photos in the blog are taken in my garden, around the date the post they illustrate is published.

I feel more connected when I’m in nature. It opens me up to see the whole. I feel grounded, rooted. I’ve felt this intimate connection with nature since I was young. For me it’s difficult to make a distinction between myself and nature. I don’t know how to do that. Being together with other people costs me energy, in most cases, but in nature I feel myself, I am at home. 

The beauty of nature – wild or cultivated – inspires and touches me. Being in nature nourishes me by its aliveness. My love of nature informs me in everything I do and choose, such as listening to my body, eating organic food, using environmentally friendly products, adapting to the changing (life) conditions. I endeavour to promote all that is natural, in all areas of life.  

All the above is about me. What about nature as such, so to say? I’ve been an active part of an economy based on exploitation, a society, ruled by ego and power over others, possessions, land, a culture in which the collective aspect is not developed properly,. The huge decline of nature, since industrialisation, was caused and created by human action. Over the last ten years I’ve been exploring what I’ve been missing, what choices of mine were wrong. I asked myself which new knowledge Í would need, which changes I would need to make in my life. It sounds a bit abstract for a wish, but, yes, my deepest longing is to fulfil my role in letting my biggest dream come true.   

#natureisvital #connectedness #whatscollective