In the beginning was the forest.

The Earth had gone through eons of dramatic change in order to grow a forest, but when humans first appeared on the scene, the African forest was home. And it was good: the forest provided everything they needed to live and raise generation after generation of cute, lovable baby humans. So the people invented the first poetic metaphor: “Mother Earth.”

In the mythology of every continent, the original humans shared one language with all the other forest creatures. The plants spoke to them and offered themselves as medicine. The animals taught them the wisdom of the natural world. So it was clear to them from the beginning that everything around them had both an outer material form and a rich inner life, just as they did.

But it never occurred to them that the inner and outer worlds were separate in any way. Just as we experience our minds and bodies, thoughts and fingers, toes and emotions, senses and sensations as inseparable parts of a single self, they took for granted that every creature and all of Creation embodied an inseparable unity of matter and spirit, the tangible and intangible aspects of life, just as they did. Even the rivers and mountains, the lightning and thunder, the sun, moon and stars were alive and intelligent and had much to teach them.

But communication with the trees and animals and thunder beings went both ways. In response to the many ways nature spoke to them, the people created art: cave paintings, clay figurines, petroglyphs carved into stone, decorative pottery, dances and songs and mythic tales. Since they lived tribally, sharing everything, they combined all these art forms into a communal art called “ritual” to express their awe and gratitude to nature. This was the origin of what we call “religion.”

When we modern folks hear old stories of plant spirits and animal allies, we might think those ancient folks sure did have vivid imaginations. But maybe what we now call “imagination” is just a vestige of our ancestors’ ability to hear the voices of nature. And maybe the arts of today are just a vestige of that creative impulse to answer nature’s voices in an infinite variety of ways, unique to every individual, generation after generation.

In every human tribe, of course, people are born with different gifts. Certain individuals earned the respect of the tribe for their special ability to hear what nature had to say. These were the shamans. They were honored as healers, because back then everyone understood that all illness arises from some kind of imbalance between humans and the intelligence of nature. The key to the art of healing was to go alone into the forest – or into the wilderness of dreams and visions within – to listen and bring back to the tribe whatever nature had to teach. And often, what the shaman brought back to the tribe was a special chant, a power song.

Where Spirit and Matter Meet

Over the millennia as humans invented civilization, agriculture, technology, and Mutual Assured Destruction, it was often the poets who walked alone into the forest to listen. The Taoist poets of ancient China, the Zen poets of Japan, the Romantic poets of Europe, and 20th century poets like Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver are all part of this neglected literary tradition, answering the voices of nature with new and creative variations on the shaman’s song.

But everyone has an imagination, not just poets: imagination is where spirit and matter meet, deep inside every one of us. And anyone can walk alone into the forest and listen. You might not bring back a poem, but there are as many different ways to creatively respond to nature as there are people. We are all part of the human conversation with nature, whether we answer with a creative act or a destructive one.

For example, whenever I discard a scribbled and scratched-up draft of a poem and start over, I remember the forest. And I remember a clearcut I once saw. I don’t have to be standing in either a forest or a clearcut to remember where paper comes from. My imagination takes me there. So even though I’m just one person and it’s just one sheet of paper, it’s mine. So I recycle it.

The same goes for metal cans, glass jars, even plastic bags and bottles and styrofoam: all of them are made of raw materials that came from the Earth. Our culture teaches us to see these things as mere material objects, mechanical parts of a material world that is completely alien to and even antithetical to spiritual concerns.

Older human societies have produced the Hindu doctrine that all matter is illusion, Plato’s philosophy of Ideal Forms, the Christian belief that Satan rules the earthly plane and the body is shameful and corrupt. Modern science and technology teach us that the Earth is disposable, a source of raw materials and a place to dump our waste.

But if I walk alone into the forest, it tells me something different. It tells me that every material thing is inseparably infused with spirit. Metal and glass and even plastic were once a part of the living Creation, and deserve to be lovingly laid to rest, resurrected and reincarnated like any other discarded husk of a living being. All of these materials gouged out of the living Earth have something to teach us. They are vessels of communion between matter and spirit, and the way we treat them reveals what kind of relationship we have with the material world.

We are fortunate in Atlanta to have the Center for Hard to Recycle Materials, the amazing CHaRM Center, which now has two locations. It is one of my sacred sites in the city. But if I can’t re-use or recycle something – and its packaging as well – I do my best not to buy it. For 29 years, at two different companies, part of my job was to re-use or recycle every scrap of waste we produced in the course of doing business, and I did my best. That is part of my own conversation with Mother Earth.

“Human Nature” Is Not an Oxymoron!

We have now entered an unprecedented new era when human waste products we can’t even see are irreversibly damaging the living Earth. Carbon makes up almost 20% of our bodies, yet when it gets out of balance in the atmosphere, it threatens to end the experiment called civilization.

That was inevitable, because civilization itself seems to have been founded on an imbalance between humans and the intelligence of nature, a rift that grows ever wider as time goes on. An ancient shaman would consider it an illness. But something within us is now calling to us across that gap, calling us home to the original world where our spiritual and material selves have never been separate, and we have never been separate from nature.

The key to the future of our species is to cultivate a spiritual relationship with the material world once more. We begin by healing the rift between matter and spirit within each of us, which is the source of most if not all of our illnesses, whether physical, mental, or emotional. Addiction, violence, depression, rage and despair all spring from an imbalanced relationship to nature, which we all inherited when we were born into a culture that has long forgotten it is part of nature.

Poets who follow the ancient path of the shaman’s song can help to heal the rift that splits “human nature” into conflicting forces called “human” and “nature.” But so can anyone else, using nature’s gift of imagination and the unique creative gifts each of us is born with.

It takes imagination to see how our petty behaviors and habits as individuals might harmfully impact an entire planet when multiplied by 8 billion. It takes imagination to grasp how that impact might rebound to affect us in turn, and just how bad the mess we’ve made could eventually get. It takes imagination to picture a different way to live, and how we might possibly get there. It takes imagination to step into other people’s shoes and begin that journey with a dialogue about what divides us and what we have in common as heirs of this planet’s one and only future.

So is “Mother Earth” just a poetic metaphor, or an intelligent and beneficent living being who loves us, provides for our needs, and scolds us when we make a mess? Don’t ask me. Walk into the forest and listen. Anyone with an imagination can hear what the forest is saying, and anyone can respond in a creative way.

If you walk into the forest with a friend, you’ll probably be mostly listening to each other. But if you go there alone, you’ll be part of a much larger but quieter conversation, one that has continued unbroken for two million years. Pay attention not only to what you hear and see around you, but to what you hear inside. You are part of nature. That voice within you is the voice of nature, too. Deep down in your imagination, there is no separation.

Note: These conjectures are based not on any academic consensus but on my personal research; they are my own ideas and do not represent any organization I’m involved in. Read a more in-depth exploration of them here. If my words resonate for you, please share widely. You can subscribe (or unsubscribe) at StephenWing.com. Read previous installments of “Wingtips” here.