I am walking, and I am walking hard. I am not just on a dusty path around a lake tonight, I am on a dusty path that winds and interconnects through my soul and yours. We are surrounded by beauty, and the convivial confluence of so much life that we often forget to be stunned by it. As we meander through the Universe and though our lives, our expression defines us. In my life of occasionally God-troubled waters, finding expression that is useful within day-to-day human experience hasn’t been as easy as the buttercups that rise so simply from the green Earth. It is by this perplexing arrangement of not knowing how to express myself that I’m learning, finally, what it means to be human, and to relate to any self along the path.

We have all come upon a place one time or another where it is easier to relate to the little waves upon the lake, or the way a leaf falls or the first evening star, than to those with whom we share breathing room. In quiet, solitary moments, we may reflect that while devoid of human romance, we swoon and muse in ecstasy to unexpected hummingbirds and the play of rain through the trees, creating private, revelatory art for ourselves. We may not puzzled and worried by clouds, or beavers in transit across the water, but by the daily course of mingling, chatting, working and struggling for meaning within the bipedal gestalt. The diaspora of human interaction is at times overwhelming, beyond what seems natural, and enough to cocoon us away into our own thoughts and reckoning of sense.

Certainly, the beautiful, simple logic of bumblebees or foraging squirrels parallels the best of humanity. Yet, with our mind games, atomic bombs, and social stratification, finding further resonance and concordance with the biosphere becomes challenging, for the artist and for the still small voice within. We live in a world of over-enforced and artificial hierarchy, the reason behind it is flimsy and based on synthetic notions of power; those at the top dictate rigid standards to be followed by those at the bottom. It becomes harder to seek out identity and quest for fullness when the resources are limited by unreal barriers. All personhood is challenged when some personhood is elevated.

What we’ve come to understand about the natural world, and indeed, the systems that form and underlie all reality, is that all is interdependent, all is in quintessential relation to form larger and larger wholes, and that survival depends upon undisturbed cycles. React as a human to war, or to hunger in a marginalized nation, or to the celebration of affluence, and your intuition will tell you that this is beyond and against nature, and if perpetuated, will continue to erode our vital connection to each other and to the Earth. In lesser and more common contexts, this is still evident; daily, we ignore, degrade, and judge, and receive the same. Each little jab is a cultural, rather than natural inheritance, and each jab is an exchange of that kind of artificial power. Not that in the animal world such jostling for territory or mating rights does not exist, rather, it exists within a set cycle that is vital for species continuation. What we do as humans most of the time that separates us from each other and nature is based upon ideological survival, not a biological principle.

Perhaps when Augustine cleaved body, mind, and spirit apart, so too was the umbilical between our being and the natural world left dangling, and difficult to mend. Our moral crusades since then have done well to eviscerate natural cycles from modern civilization, yet we are far more keen than the behavioral institutions and formalities that have sought to tame our inmost selves. We are of this Earth, and thus, inseparable from its deeper ways. We belong to tides, tundra and tornado. The intrinsic love that you feel in the height of your adoration lives in the mountains as strongly as it lights up your cortex. The best of our human ideals- love, compassion, creativity- are as original to the body of the Earth and her communities of fellow creatures as they are to the unique constellation of your life. If we cling to narrow definitions of what it means to be human, we will miss our connection, our profound relation, to the nature that is us. It doesn’t encompass us; it is us.

A good sunset (when is there not one?) is as rewarding and life-affirming to me as a long hug. The chorus of crickets on a late summer eve is as integrating as gazing into your eyes. At times, I may drift from understanding what it means to say “I Am” and find resolution in cupping a rosebud in my hand and saying “We Are.” I may become disgruntled with the games of authority people play and get lost instead in wonder of mountain lions and the algae that covers still ponds in swirls. You may find more acceptance in a meteor shower or a cat’s rough tongue than from a box of chocolates or a law that was just passed that ‘guarantees’ you what is inherent anyway. It is because in these things we find the order, the goodness, the simplicity of existing that we find lacking in our routines.

Life is an active and conscious reconciliation of the elements, which summons forth simply by being that rarest of essence, Spirit. Life itself may be a rarity, galactically speaking. In my short walk around the lake, I saw a very large Snowy Egret, a green heron, a night heron, several bats, a baby turtle in the marsh and a sunfish mellowing under a bridge. I cannot begin to count the other birds, insects, and the teeming multitudes invisible to my eye. I did speak to two other humans; we were watching the egret and the green heron perched in a tree. Our reference was natural, and as odd as this random gathering of humans, so was the conversation... for we were in awe. Beauty brings us all back to interconnection, with ourselves and the world that yearns to be free of our disconnection. If we can dare to relate to each other with beauty as the source of our motivation, if we strive to understand, and work toward spiritual reunion with the natural, we are accepting the dare to express ourselves without fear. That’s been my work, I’ve found, and that’s been central to my gradual, far from complete reckoning of personhood, and what it may mean to be for this brief time a human being. For now, the best I can say is let beauty be our commonality. Then, finally, as we walk along the dusty path that winds through my soul and yours, we can at last say with total confidence, “hello.”