na·ture (noun): the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.

   

Think about the things that happen when humans aren’t there. The things invisible to us. The pieces of the puzzle lost under the couch, the parts of Earth unexplored, unseen, undisturbed. The magic that happens when no human is there to disrupt. (Things not created by humans, Sacred.) The depths of the ocean inhabited by dark, by cold space, by fish that glow, reflect, shimmer.

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Think of the endless space of the universe that’s floating around us. The spinning, twirling wings of birds, who fly above the clouds. The dense caves occupied by resting bears, parents who care so much. The whistling of the rainforest when no one is around (if a tree falls, does it make a sound? If we were listening, would we hear it?) Bioluminescence. Resting volcanoes. Waiting predators. The glint of an eagles eye, soaring, searching for prey. Spirits, flitting around, weaving through trees and ruins.

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Beauty is rarely untarnished. Humans take beauty in their grabby, chubby toddler hands and they dissect, they anatomize, they examine and analyze and when they’ve found out all they can, they discard the beauty with a clunk, back where it came from, violated, its innocence gone. A world run by left-side brains. Is beauty still beauty if it’s been viewed by all the world? Can something be beautiful to someone once it’s been seen? Or would the excitement fade like a child’s, an abandoned toy three days after Christmas?

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Think about the animals undiscovered. Think about the different species hiding in the secluded corners of the world. A possibility of new insects, birds, fish. How beautiful in the wild, yet how sad to think about them poked, prodded, and caged. The wonders of the world, tundras and deserts and forests and oceans, holding secrets and potential beneath their waves, their leaves, their soil. It makes you wonder, are there some things that should be left undiscovered? If we found everything, would we stop there? It’s human nature to find, to seek, to search. To taketaketake, our greedy admiration. Would we keep searching and finding until there was nothing left to find, nothing left to occupy ourselves? We’d twiddle our thumbs into post-existence.  

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How we bite the hand that feeds us by disrespecting the earth, by developing and urbanizing. We modernize and mutilate and modify nature, eager to build build build. It’s a comfort to know that there are still places untouched by our contaminating mechanic hands. Humans are vacuums, sucking in the souls of all the aspects of nature. Thankfully, some pieces of our little world act as the dog, terrified of the vacuum, running and hiding. Humans can only ruin so much.

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We disregard the fact that there is life outside of humanity, that plants live and animals breathe and Mother Nature sheds tears disguised as storms, grieving for the death of her planet and it’s secrecy. We chew up the air and spit out pollution, we tarnish organic, natural foods with preservatives and insecticides. Is there anything on the earth not filtered through with humanity, the sacred nature of it held under a microscope? That’s why I take comfort in the endless depths of the oceans, in the spaces above the clouds, in the vast expansions of outer space.

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It’s a miracle everything has not been discovered, humans have been around for quite a while. Yet I hope that maybe, we’ll never stop discovering. There will always be more tests to be done, more experiments and more knowledge to be gained. There will always be more dark matter to be filled with light and wisdom. And, of course, there will always be nature to admire, or think about, whether invisible to us or not.

 

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; anything essential is invisible to the eye.”

-Antoine de Saint Exupéry