The Power of Nature

Have you ever considered why being in nature is so important to us, why it makes us listen, and what feeling it elicits?

In his book of essays, The Great Work, Thomas Berry, a cultural historian, discusses being in nature and points out that the most important qualities that humans respond to are awe, joy and reverence.

Berry puts his hand on the sensitive pulse of life as he notes that these feelings open us to all the life on the Earth and somehow it changes us for the better.

Once humans developed language, they probably sat around a fire at night and told stories of their great heroes and even of their own daily adventures.

For a very long time the quality that linked these stories from all over the world was separation.

We are in a very different time now. One that beckons us to embrace our moments of awe, respect and inspiration and find the unity we have experienced.

I recall as a child how important a certain scene was to me, so important that even now I find myself deeply moved and tears almost well up as I remember it. The scene was the prairie land east of Pueblo, Colorado where I rode a horse up the sides of a rocky mesa to its top.

From there I could see beyond the city of Pueblo with its steel mills and smokestacks belching black smoke into the air.

Behind the mid-state city and to the west were the saw-tooth Sangre de Cristo Mountains linking towering, snow packed Pikes Peak to the north to the twin Spanish Peaks to the south near the New Mexico border.

It was a view view so big that it took in almost half the state of Colorado. I can still see Pikes Peak and the Spanish Peaks when I fly into Denver and I remember the longing and the urgency to be with the Earth.

The scene grew on me over the few years of my youth when I was able to go there. I came to crave being outdoors.

The power of nature, whatever form it took, became a solace and I felt with it and wanted to be in it and with it always. But life has a way of growing us up and forcing us into different patterns and that has its beauty and goodness too!

Those special times when I was with the horse atop the mesa were moments of sincere dedication to something that filled me with awe and reverence.

The magnificence and the majesty of the scene stole my breath!

I could not then and perhaps not even now, more than 60 years later could I give you an adequate translation of what happened within me, but looking back I can see that the stirring inside was the sacredness I saw before me.

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For a good read see:
The Great Work ; Our Way into the Future by Thomas Berry, Bell Tower, New York, 1999.