Humans think and act as if the relationship between us an nature is one of a distinct creature and a set of forces. It is actually more like a fish. Nature is ‘the living water’ in which our kind of fish arises.

Because we are so confused, we are terrified of the water, and attack it… converting it to commerce-objects and numbers inside books and machines.

We are mistaken; the nature of the relationship between human beings and nature is obvious. It is identity. We -are- Nature. Nature is us.

It is as if Nature’s own most sophisticated distributed nervous-system element (think neurons) became terrified of all other cell forms, and organs… and even the bones… and started attacking them, aggressively. When, in fact, their actual nature and best function was to connect everything… and in this recognition achieve an entirely new dimension of communal opportunity.

Instead, we get omnicide. Inside our bodies, and everywhere else. We kill everything that moves, and much of what doesn’t. This is, in part, because the ideas that we have about identity are broken, and the damage is acts as if it were intelligent, and can, in many cases, drive human cultures around like a vehicle for its own expression and defense. Our kind of damage defends itself. From us. As us.

We must somehow retrieve direct experience of the fact of our identity -as nature-, for, without this, we are hardly human. And with it, we will become endowed to recover and extend the astonishing and infinite frontiers of our relational sophistication, our intelligence, and our compassion. That is our actual nature, and our survival in and as Nature demands nothing less.