Nature Day to Day: A Humanizing Influence

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

- William Wordsworth

Regular contact with nature helps humanize us. We can know a sense of unity with all life by way of the sights and sounds of the natural world. This important spiritual element is often left out of discussions of why protecting the environment is a critical issue for our time.

If your hometown and home state are anything like mine, you know how much things have been changing. National parks are wonderful and important places of inspiration and heritage, but we don't live there. We are crowding nature out of our daily lives. Yet I believe that it is precisely here, at the borderlands and interchanges of our ordinary human activities with the natural landscape, that nature affects us most profoundly.

Opening the door and windows as we clean the house vigorously on a beautiful day lets in breezes that help clear the mind. Taking a brief stroll in the backyard can lend us some distance and perspective. A window with an open view, some light and air, a tree here and there, gives sky and space a place at our table. Our homes potentially present our most consequential interfaces with nature.

Next would come those nearby places with which we've developed relationships, knowing what they're like in different lightings and at different times of year. Our best moments with nature tend to occur not during vacations but when we are leading our ordinary lives. Once, I went to put a letter in the mailbox at the top of the hill where I lived, then turned around to see the biggest moon I ever saw. It looked like an illustration from a child's picture book, so hoveringly and hauntingly real that it seemed to illustrate something beyond belief!

A big black sky away from city lights, where you can really see the blackness and the stars and know for sure that everything that's going on is bigger than your problems. The long, stately intervals between forlorn bird calls, somehow tinged with an untold solace. If we continue crowding nature out of our daily lives, future generations will never know what they've missed but will experience the consequences. We need freestanding fields and stretches of woods within and around our own homes and communities.

There wouldn't be much left of me if you subtracted things I've learned from fields and trees, the way wind plays and branches sway, and how great darkness brightens what little light it holds until it sparkles.

As part of his WOW! Women On Writing blog tour, author Paul Maurice Martin is featured on Holistic Future to share this article adapted from his book, Original Faith: What Your Life Is Trying to Tell You.

At age twenty-three, Paul Maurice Martin had a powerful spontaneous spiritual experience of the kind often sought in meditation. It set his life on a new course.

He went on to earn master's degrees in religious studies and counseling. Soon he found his notes and journaling shaping up into the manuscript for Original Faith: What Your Life Is Trying to Tell You.

Paul developed a devastating progressive illness at age thirty-seven. For about ten years he was forced to set writing aside to focus on medical research and treatment.

Finally too disabled for work, Paul took up his manuscript again, completing "Original Faith" while losing most of his ability to stand and walk. Mostly bedridden, Paul lives by the words of enduring faith that he has written.

You can learn more about book and author at originalfaith.com.