Irked by the pressure I felt to complete a task (I hate this about myself) I started working in the garden last weekend making my annual Christmas wreaths. As my mood softened, the sun and, the beauty of the day made me ‘really’ look around and I did a mental shift. I started to reflect how we define our days through nature, but in turn fail to acknowledge this; because we take it for granted; in our introspective day to day pursuit of living.

All I initially felt last weekend was that the weather was mild, that the wisteria was not too dry to bend, and that pruning at this time would allow the plant enough time to heal before the first frost. Three facts that governed my day; three facts determined by nature. And three facts I originally disregarded until I started to look outwards.

As an urbanite removed from nature’s cycles for basic survival (by this I mean I don’t live from my own sustainability) I failed to see at first how it defined my day. Listening to the weather channel, reading about flash floods in Britain or taking a daily walk in the local trails at a fast pace with a mind clouded with relentless dull tasks is not communing with nature. Every day we all live by and through nature; it delineates our mood, what we wear, how we eat, what activities we do, but somehow as part of our mindless routine we overlook the intricate power that nature holds over us.

We hold the belief that we can harness nature, cultivate it and make it yield to our advancement of intellect and technology. What a huge joke! As time and time again we see world disaster, death, illness, hunger, poverty and hardship brought about by nature’s influence and not in a subtle way, but in a searing catastrophic way. Which, makes us shudder, but fails to make change.

Our relationship to nature is very complex, yet paradoxically ambivalent. Without its life force we wouldn’t live, yet we deny this any reverence. It’s the metaphor of plodding on with our heads down and failing to see the horizon and the on coming………

I lifted my head, briefly last weekend; the effort is to keep it up.