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Artist, archaeologist, and biological anthropologist Victoria Pham once wrote “When we consider gardening, we often create a relationship with the natural world through control. Instead of revealing the soil beneath our feet, we often seek to conceal it, relegating soil to a tool from which our ideal form grows”.
I believe that it has been ingrained in our primordial instinct to seek power and to be in control. In a civilisation where “getting it all” has been a life-long academic-scientific-historical-socio-political goal, a neurosis is formed when the fluid paradoxical meaninglessness of life is confronted.
To know. We always have to know.
Since infancy, we have learnt to hate it when things don’t go our way, or go beyond our knowing. Then we grow up. We gradually learn to love accidents. Chance. Freedom. Expressionism. Art. All that which champions and celebrates a subversion of knowing, of certainty, of science and logic.
Accidents, they are. But controlled accidents, are what they truly are.
We always think we know.
How to touch a tree.
How to smell a flower.
How to take in air.
How to listen to the wind.
How to use a rock.
How to experience water.
How to make things do things.
How to stop things from happening.
How to feel.
How to talk.
About stuffs.
On behalf of stuffs.
To get stuffs.
To reject stuffs.
Stuffs that we think we know.
Stuffs that we know we don’t know but we pretend that we know and we think if we try hard enough we may know. And when we think that we may know for too long we start to believe that we may have known already. And we believe we know. We believe we know it all.
We believe we have everything under control.
this so called ground is not the bottom,
but has depth,
has layers,
is porous
and textured differently everywhere,
and i think about the humans who want to drill a hole from the surface to the core of the earth and back out the other side,
i think about that desire
and i let any reaction to that sink in,
because the ground is so much
more than just an ashtray to place your feet,
build your homes,
feed your familes,
to bury your bodies,
does it not feel when you leave your imprint?
after years and years and years of a well loved spot does it not erode
and mould itself into the shape of
palm prints? foot prints? bodily curves?
where else would we be?
We, as humans, respond to the idea of nature's cycle with a spectrum of emotions and attitudes. Some of us find solace and comfort in the notion of returning to the earth, seeing it as a natural and inevitable part of our existence. We may embrace concepts of interconnectedness and harmony with the environment, finding meaning in the cyclical nature of life and death. Others among us may fear or resist the idea, grappling with mortality and the unknown. Our cultural, religious, and personal beliefs shape our individual responses, influencing how we perceive and interact with the natural world. Ultimately, our relationship with nature reflects a complex interplay of reverence, acceptance, and introspection.