Wild Nature

A reaction I couldn't shake off after watching Wildest Indochina.

The utterness of nature
Creating in me just one expression
Ugly

Crawling, Lingering, Dissolving
Viciously eating and gnawing
Nature

Wild and outside us
We came from it
But our minds
Pull us away

Dangerous
Amoral
Nature

Reviews

[Namrata]

Why, I love this picture you put in here. I am way too fond of insects. Nature has its own sides , like all of us do since we are primitive to that. It only adheres to the situation, so I guess all is cool. What's life but excitement ?

[K Scott Smith]

This is a really interestingly unique and good read

[Mary Bosworth]

A good strong emotion filled write. Thank you for sharing it with us

[John Anderson]

This is such a deeply moving poem with vivid imagery and a powerful delivery.

[Amber Lily]

It is interesting how humans find nature beautiful and peaceful, but then when you see all the animals murdering for food or their land being destroyed, you realize there is no less chaos than the human world you were trying to escape from.
Very insightful :)

[Mike Defreitas]

Thats exactly it. The paradox and discomfort in both finding nature utterly beautiful and awesome; but at the same time, when you see the violence and the grossness - and the rhinoceros beetle is meant to highlight this - you're thrown into a tangle: its hard to look at; ants are nice from away. But let the touch me? hell f*****g no.

Its a strange situstion that adumbrates the surrealism of being human. Were a part of all of this; but yet we WANT to be away from it all; from the dirtiness and s**t and decomposing matter and all the creepy crawlingness of it all.

Its because unlike the automata of animals, we can think: we can represent to ourselves what it is were seeing. Things aren't just as they seem at the sensual level - our mind takes it in and transforms it via metaphor into perceptions such as what I've written above.

I love nature. I am astonished and in awe of it. But when I see it for all that it is, I am terrified of it. It makes me see how nature has designed humans to pull away from it; to build "worlds" - or towns and cities, that are protections from this all to raw reality.

[Amber Lily]

But what's really interesting is that even though we have tried to pull away from it, our actions have also negatively affected it. We tried to run from nature but since we are a part of it, we naturally fight and cause war.

[Mike Defreitas]

I agree. I think that has to do with how we feel about paradox. Were so used to seeing things in black and white (hence why I wrote "and outside us" and "pulling us away" in black) that we fail to see nature for what it is: beyond good or evil, right or wrong, black or white.

Humans need morality to live peaceably with one another. But in recognizing this need in ourselves, we've demonized nature. We've turned it into something that "needs to be controlled" - hated and reviled. And this reflects completely in our thinking and culture. How we see women, for example, has historically been reified in our attitudes towards nature: dangerous, needs to be controlled.

But as we've now learned, if you do not understand nature for what it is - for us and for our planet as whole - we actually bring harm to ourselves. Nature is our background, the condition on which we are allowed to exist. We have ignored this for too long and now, with climate change and other environmental issues, were forced to see how we ourselves are dependent on nature.

It's a partnership paradigm we are moving towards. Men and Women. Humanity and the natural world. Domination is a failed and ignorant we of relating. Understanding and accepting the paradox of complementarity is what was true all along.