Few people experience less than awe when confronted with unadulterated Nature, though the ranks perhaps are growing. In our built environment everything is placed into convenient packages; thoroughly researched, poked, prodded and analyzed until Western science is satisfied that it has become boring enough for human consumption. In a natural system, biology becomes something that cannot be parceled and measured. It’s too vast. Too inclusive, too extensive and at the same time too minute. In a forest, a biologist is forced to surrender to her subject.
I came to India without a clear purpose. And in a way, I have yet to come to India. I live more in a parallel universe than any particular country. India is that bustling, chaotic, mystical land of dust and rivers. Here, in the little-known shola-grassland ecosystem of the Western Ghats, the favored images of the subcontinent fall to pieces. I have several times tried, and every time failed, to describe my natural surroundings in these black and white words. The layers upon layers of gently (ever so gently!) sloping hills, topped with grasslands like pink bald spots, and between these “barren” lookout points: densely forested valleys that are fertile, feminine and fierce. One feels damp just gazing over the landscape from the grassy tops of the hills.
My home is beneath the canopy. A canopy that cannot legally be sacrificed in the name of development or agriculture. The trees are owned by the government, and by some fluke it is illegal for farmers to cut down the native giants on their land. The undergrowth was not afforded the same luxury. So although I’m surrounded on all sides by plantations, I can barely see a meter in front of me without a tree, dripping in epiphytes, blocking my line of vision. Sometimes it’s overwhelming, claustrophobic and limiting to my state of mind. I feel trapped in this strange world where I couldn’t use a cell phone if I wanted to, where I haven’t seen a television commercial for four months, and where I have just plain stopped following the news altogether. So I walk. I walk up. Playing with new-found muscles in my city-atrophied legs. I walk up towards the grass. Towards a simpler, less oppressive ecosystem.
I snap out my chettai and let it unfold itself in the breeze. It lands catawampus on the poky grasses and I stretch my body out, tip back my “Coorg Wildlife Society” cap and gaze. At nothing in particular. I let my eyes greedily drink in the wide, gaping, open hillscape. Some call them mountains, but Pacific Northwesterners would scoff at the thought. These are foothills, if they’re anything. The foothills of mountains that no longer exist. They have been scraped and chiseled down by ages of extreme rainfall and relentless winds into these humble green and brown crests.
As my head tips back, I see the blueness of the dusky sky. Further back and I see the upside-down tips of the grasses, left to grow un-mowed save for cow-tooth maintenance, and I focus on these. Slowly what was a speck in my vision becomes a tiny spider. I reach out to touch it but am blocked by a deceptively strong, invisible web that sticks to my finger as I pull it back. And then I see them: Hundreds of tiny spiders. Each staking out a separate blade of tall, seedy grass. You can’t see them until you get down to their level. They are the silent militia of the grassland; laying in wait for the flying insects that emerge with the dusk. I have probably ruined a night’s hunt for many of them with the unfolding of my chettai, having smashed down their barracks.
So here is what I’ve learned in my non-India: that Nature is telescopic. It functions in perfect balance on both the greatest and the tiniest scales imaginable. How arrogant we are to think we live outside of it! Or even to think we can throw off its balance. This impending doom we’re all cowering from is Nature shaking us off her back. Balancing herself. Our parceling, patenting and marketing of “nature” is laughable! Elements of the natural environment (as directly opposed to those of the built environment) can only be truly understood in that web of existence from which none of us can be extracted. And that kind of understanding is not a scientific pursuit; it’s a spiritual investigation.
How have we come so far from the understanding that we can’t understand it all? Why have so many children (including myself) grown up without the deep reverence for a quiet forest at dusk that should simply come with being human? And what does it mean for our future as a species?
But you don’t have to be a child to gain that respect and humility. It’s too natural to be inaccessible. It’s unnatural not to feel connected to the rest of life on Earth, and so it comes easily when you let it.
I guess there are tons of theories out there about consciousness, but I am actively not a philosopher, so I don’t know them. But it’s my opinion that our ability to look outward with a critical eye was an evolutionary fluke-- just like every trait in every plant or animal. I think our generation’s salvation lies within our Nature-given ability to look inward and ask, Why do we think we can know it all? Why would we ever think we could take the world apart into little digestible pieces and finally figure out the puzzle? Solve everything? What even needs to be solved?
Why do we need anything more than to gaze out at the natural world and marvel that we are part of this?
i think you're a philosopher :P
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