There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron

Bring in Nature to Man

It must have affected us all at some part in our lives when we looked at a beautiful green tree, when we listened to a passing bird’s song telling us what seemed for a moment the real news of the world he’d been to, or when we sat by the shore thinking of nothing else but the sound of the waves coming and going trying to get inside to wash all the stains. Then they take away everything we don’t want to remember. When we were sad, we drew back to Mother Nature and put our heads on her breast with our eyes closed and our faces covered by her kind bosom. I guess then all of us agree with what Lord Byron said here. We once felt the pleasure and the rapture and we once lost ourselves to the power of nature; and by far there has been nothing else that made us ever feel the same.

We were young once when we were in the arms of nature, but now, away, we have grown so old. We grew out of our love for nature and those childish games we used to play belong to children now, but not to the realists we have become, not to the categorized and numbered beings we have become, and not to the big supermarket we live in where everything and everybody has a price; anything or anybody can be bought; the more experience we have, the more knowledge we have in pricing everything in this life, including ourselves. Oh yes! We have grown out of Mother Nature; we have grown wider and bigger and more important, but never wiser. How many more strikes from her do we still need to understand how far we have drifted? How much more death and pain needs to be inflicted before we learn the power of life we see in her is much bigger a lesson and more powerful than the power of destruction? How many more good people need to die banished, neglected, underrated and underestimated just because they joined forces with nature? Why are we in a battle with nature? Why are we killing our mother?

Mother Earth is not asking us to leave our technologies, power plants, and factories to go back live in the stone age; all she wants is what all mothers want, to learn something from her and to understand and remember where we all come from and that this is not my home or your home; it is the home for all of us together. Mother wants to teach us about life by giving us so much life; she wants to teach us about giving like her, being so generous with us; she wants to teach us about peace like this we all feel when we are with her like the one in Lord Byron’s poem. She wants us to go back to the natural human beings we were born to be and shed the many masks and fig leaves we have covered ourselves with. Mother is calling for us, let us all go to her; not to abandon our homes and cities and so-called civilization to go live on lake Walden, but to bring her into our hearts and lives so that when one looks inside our hearts, they can see the green, the life, and Mother Nature alive inside ourselves.