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“People often seek peace in secluded places like the countryside or the seaside, and you may also long for such retreats. But this desire comes from a lack of understanding. Whenever you wish, you can retreat into your own mind and find tranquility, free from distractions. The best place to find peace is within yourself, especially if you have cultivated inner resources that provide ease and tranquility whenever you reflect on them.”
Marcus Aurelius
It’s a common practice that to unwind, gain balance or find a little sanity we often look to nature. We go for a hike or camping, or perhaps a simple walk where we live. These are, of course, wonderful things to do. But what does it say about our relationship to nature in the rest of our time? If nature is where we go to find peace, why are we not working in relationship to nature?
I believe the common desire many if not most of us who live in the industrialized world have to take trips to nature speaks to the disconnection we have developed in previous centuries with nature. When we spend time in nature, whether through simply going for a walk or taking extended time for a camping trip, we are placing ourselves into a more natural state of how human beings were largely wired to live. We become (at least for a little bit of time) reconnected with the relationship we share with all of life.
The relationship of life is not only something to reconnect with, it is an identity which can free us from much the suffering, stress and anxiety of modern life. If we have the relationships of life as our basic worldview, then hardships we face will not feel so isolating or as though everything is up to us to overcome or accomplish, but that who we are at a fundamental level is intertwined with something unfathomably larger than ourselves as an individual.
Life is relationship. And we are life.
