2018-01-03. The below was originally published by Myrna on www.worldwide-wilderness.com. I copied it here while discontinuing that site in its current form.
The deepest love of my life is the World on which we live.
She gave us all we have in her abundance, she will take us back into her bosom, into her breath, at the end of our lives and make us into yet another of her creations.
She deserves our love and respect; our fear and disregard of her are clearly harmful to her and ourselves.
The disconnect that is caused by our way of (not) looking at the World begets so many of the problems that we can observe around us.
The fear of people for our Earth has its roots in a fundamental misunderstanding of her nature, mistakingly thinking of Wilderness as destructive, dangerous and brutal in her untamed state. The fear has scared out of our heads the understanding that this is just one side of the duality, overshadowing the positive and creative, which lies not only at the opposite of the destructive side, but is also to be found within it.
My understanding of Wilderness is of resillience and strenght, because in that, both priciples are recognized. I often take pictures of mushrooms, flowers and insects on the roadside or in the middle of the city. It proves to me the power of Nature to incorporate and generate even in the most difficult circumstances.
My preference for taking pictures of mushrooms also stems from this idea. A thing as beautiful and special as a mushroom (remember that it does not need it’s possible bright colours to attract insects for polination or anything else …) can only grow where there is dead material to feed on.
This is also why I love taking pictures at my father’s place. Fifteen years ago it was a spotless garden and three meadows, and now, after much digging, piling, planting and pulling down trees, it has become a piece of Wilderness akin to my idea of paradise, where rare flowers and animals can be found. All that can be seen there depends on something else to die or live for its own journey through life, into death. Without use of massive amounts of dead plant and tree material it is a long and arduous task to stimulate the growth of new life, patiently waiting for Nature itself to undertake the task of accumulating the wealth of death on which to grow.
Seeing these things, and taking part in helping them along, has taught me some of the most important things that I now know about the power of the Wilderness that brought fourth a species as strange as us humans. It has also given me the precious insight that this Wilderness lives on inside of us, its creatures, with both its destructive and creative sides showing in our actions. Accepting the dominance of Wilderness in our creation makes it easier to understand our dual nature, and steer away from the emphasis on our destructive side that is so prevalent in our current culture of fear.
Recognizing, accepting and dealing with this fear should, in my view, be the main priority of our culture in the decades to come. Stimulating this in myself and others is the main motivation in everything that I do. The sight of the Earth and her human inhabitants recoiling from each other in horror is one that I long to replace by a rapt fascination for everything that is and shares our World, and through that, have all conciousness around us marvel at the beauty and wholeness of us as a part of this marvellous creation that is our World.
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