Society is garbage, “Nature” is Sacred.
Aldo Leopold wrote “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” I would expound on that to say that being alive in the world in most places today as one who has a relationship with non-human things means living embedded in a society that is innately disconnected from anything real.
I’ve heard so much obnoxious and rhetorical talk throughout the years about “spirituality” from an endless parade of charlatans. It was always hard to swallow because the people who pronounced it rarely ever lived it, and to speak of spirituality if one has never actually done the work to look inside themselves with humility and be honest in the way about their own fears and failures, the way that - for example - alcoholics and addicts in recovery do seems phony at best and outright dangerously dishonest at worst.
At some point along this weird winding road I’ve been on, being fixated with plant life and the things that interact with them - after nights seeing sunsets and feeling rockfaces in my hands and winds on my forehead - I had to admit that there was something more to what I was doing then just obsessive fixation. My relationship with plants and the entire living world outside of humanity became spiritual, and at the same time I moved to a place where the subconscious ethos of the dominant society was inherently pitted against everything I believed in and cared about.
Texas is not kind or tolerant of the living biological fabric that coats the Earth within the make-believe geopolitical boundaries of the state. The doctrines of the silly dominant religion are probably one reason. Christianity is not alone in its mindless disregard and enabling of an Anthropocentric worldview. None of the Abrahamic religions display any large degree of tolerance, awareness or stewardship to Earth’s biosphere, where as most of them believe it to be a disposable by-product or background scenery to what’s really important - the test of faith and behavior that is a human lifespan, all of it one big opportunity to see how much humans can live up to “His” expectations and rules. The biological skin of the Earth is only there for us to exploit and use during our time here.
It is common among progressives today to fetishize anything “indigenous” without talking about the ideologies and connections to the life around them that some indigenous cultures exuded. There is often no mention of the animism or beliefs of some indigenous cultures and groups that made them worth noting in comparison to the present day or what could be learned from them, only a focus on racial identity - outside of a context for racial history and oppression, this is merely another metric with which human social groups - as social primates - have used to self-segregate and divide.
I don’t think it’s preposterous to say that my sense of spirituality, my religion, is the plant life that surrounds me. That is why I nurture it. My religion is the cicadas that sing in the trees at dusk. That is why I smile and thank them. My religion is the rock dust that blows into my teeth on windy days in the desert. That is why I might laugh at how much it sucks, but I don’t complain. It is my belief that I - and no other human - is of no greater importance than any other element of the biosphere, and that if we take from the system that we are inseparably tied to, we must equate by giving something back. I hate lawns because they inherently deny all of this. I hate strip malls because they reduce the human experience to a transaction. I hate all-american sprawl and vehicle culture because it traps us in cars that isolate us from each other and from the world. And though I love people as individuals, I’m only being somewhat hyperbolic when I say that I hate society as it stands today because existing within it is generally insufferable, smothering, isolating, alienating, deadening, numbing and often times rooted in values and ideologies that I equate with vacuous, mind-numbing garbage.
