Warm weather reminds me of myself again in ways I don’t realize I had forgotten (maybe that’s just Seasonal Affective Disorder?) but I had a similar experience coming down from the mountains in China after a month of monastic retreat, down into a completely different environment: the city of Ningbo. Walking on the sidewalk in a crowd, watching traffic lights, crossing between cars, all very mundane activities of negotiating the city, made me feel immediately at home. There was the same feeling in Dublin last winter. While I had never been to Ningbo, I had been to Ireland & Dublin many times. But last winter, when we came to the city, after being in the countryside for days, I realized I felt at home in Dublin in a way I couldn’t feel in the vast farmland of County Kerry. In the countryside, I could certainly love, and be in awe and gratitude standing on the breathtaking Irish shore or laying on the gorgeous rolling green hills. But it didn’t hit my heart in the same way the narrow pavement, tall buildings and crowded streets of Dublin did.
The way the authors of Spiritual Ecology, and sometimes Kimmerer too, talk about human orientation to nature, it is an experience of primordial, overwhelming love, and their calls for ecological awareness tend to follow the narrative of humanity returning to nature, to our natural origins–our purity, our truth. But I think something Miller makes clear in China’s Green Religion is that, in a way, we’ve never lost that connection because nature and humanity are not ontologically separate entities.
Furthermore, the ‘return to nature’ narrative (implied it seems by the discourse around the Anthropocene) feeds into this urban/rural dichotomy, where the two are antithetical, opposing forces. But, speaking to a group of people who have chosen to live in New York City, aren’t the experiences of kinship and awe, often used to describe a loving human/nature relationship, also felt in an urban landscape? The urban/nature divide doesn’t recognize that experiences of happiness or transcendence happen in the City. It doesn’t imagine a future where human life consists thoroughly of both the urban and the natural; but, as we know, if the progression of human technology is to continue, it must also include the flourishing of nature.
Perhaps it would be helpful – for us as well as for other condensations of qi – for us to understand ecosystems like forests and coral reefs as resembling cities. I think I’ve seen the analogy with respect to rain forests and reefs but why stop there?
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