Sublime

An ecosystem is the aggregate of many species’ habits of transformation, their ways of moving energy from its origin in the sun across space and condensing it over time. To be alive is to take a place in a chain of conversions.

Nature transcends our tendencies to label and classify, to reduce and limit. The natural world is unfathomably more rich, interwoven, and complicated than we are taught, and so much more mysterious and beautiful.

Planets revolve around the sun, seeds become flowers, embryos become babies, and with no help from us. Their movement is built into a natural system. You and I are integral parts of that system, too. We can let our lives be directed by the same force that makes flowers grow—or we can do it ourselves.

nature's intention for us is not static. This intent itself has been evolving from the very beginnings of the human story: how we are presently designed to grow whole is not quite the same as how we were designed to grow whole in the past. For example, one of the things I've learned from Thomas Berry is that modern science and cosmology require us

One simple standard definition is that nature is the opposite of culture—that is to say, everything that people have not created or changed.

I want to understand how we humans do that—how we earn a place on this precious planet, get in the “right relationship” with it.5 So I am focusing on the ways creatures and ecosystems function together in and with the natural world.

Our nature, our Being, is the most precious thing there is, yet most of us lose touch with it as we dream, wish, hope, scheme, and struggle to have what we think is a good life.

Natural intelligence intends that every living thing become the highest form of itself and designs us accordingly.”