What do you experience when you are in nature?

I love to work 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, I must add. 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.

I’ve felt an intimate connection with nature since I was young. I feel more grounded, rooted, when I’m in nature. I feel no distance or distinction between myself and nature. I don’t know how to make a distinction. 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 through 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.

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, which started in the first phase of industrialisation and has become clear, now, is 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 I would need, which changes I would need to make in my life. I’ve been using Humanity’s Code of Care – Take care of self, others, places and the planet – as my guiding principle to find new ways to apply it in everyday life – in personal life and in the lifemap projects. My challenging question is: How can we learn to care for ourselves, others, places and the planet simultaneously, at every step?