Return to Mother Nature’s Wisdom

In many ways, the postmodern world is driven by a toxic masculine that endorses wars, destroys the environment and makes us sick—all in the name of profit. This is the same mindset that reveres an invisible and distant God while abusing and destroying the most exquisite manifestations of the divine—life on Earth.

This dreadful quandary is due to our disconnect from Mother Nature and her web of life. It also gives birth to a split of mind and body articulated by Descartes’ and his declaration “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), glorifying the primacy of thought and reason over the senses and the natural world. This way, Mother Nature becomes a domain to be studied, controlled, and exploited, and the Earth a soulless rock.

The patriarchy has been responsible for blaming  and shaming our bodies (specially the female body) as the source of evil desires, and claimed that salvation requires the rejection of the senses. This view has created unimaginable conflict in our psyches and resulted in perverted acts of sexual abuse and exploitation at all levels of religious hierarchies.

A final separation is occurring with virtual reality luring us away from our blood and bones and sensory existence and seducing us into a promised land in avatar bodies.

If you grew up in modern society you have been brain-washed by these beliefs, but hopefully you haven’t been swallowed up into a world numb to the whispers and to the cries of Mother Nature.

As modern shamans dedicated to creating a healthier world, we must remember we belong to Mother Nature – she does not belong to us –  and embrace the infinite wisdom that she readily offers to us. If we take a moment to contemplate the magnificence of nature’s flow—such as when a lotus flower emerges from muddy waters, how the first light of dawn awakens the birds, how the salmon swim upstream with the high tides under the full moon, how wolves mate in the snow and birth pups in the spring, and how auroras produced by solar winds dance in the sky—we can’t help but recognize there is an infinite creative intelligence orchestrating the birth and death of galaxies.

Today, on the verge of the fifth mass extinction of species on Earth, we need to re-align with that  intelligence.

At the same time, it doesn’t mean that everything we have accomplished with ‘progress’ needs be abandoned. Thanks to science we have a newfound understanding of nature and technological advances that can be put into service to repair the damage that we have done.

However, we must abandon our colonial attitude that says that we know better than nature. Instead, we are called to learn to flow with nature’s  boundless intelligence and her power to regenerate.

I learned this the hard way. When Alberto and I began to reforest the land at Los Lobos, our retreat center in Chile, we thought it was simply a matter of planting trees, but after a few years of observing nature we learned the forest has her own way.

We realized that it is more effective to help soil regenerate itself, so the seeds of the trees have a fertile place to land and grow, rather than planting trees in degraded land. This way, with a thicker layer of mulch, the water from the rain remains longer in place which is especially important in my area which tends to suffer from drought.

Mother Nature provides nourishment every moment of our lives!

Please share about one aspect of how nature’s wisdom is relevant in the way you live today.

Blessings!

Marcela Lobos