It’s so easy to feel separate from the world - indeed we’re taught in many ways that human beings are in some profound way separate, different, and apart from nature. So what happens when we start to allow the world around us to be our teacher... when we look within us to find resonance with that which we find around us? And when we let the living and non-living world teach us new ways of relating, understanding, acting and loving?

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.

Here’s our source for this week:

Nature is Imagination

[The phrase] the ‘more than human world’ refers to a way of thinking which seeks to override our human tendency to separate ourselves from the natural world… the erroneous idea that there is a neat divide between humans and non-humans, between our lives and the teeming, multitudinous living and being of the planet.

The ‘more than human world’ acknowledges that the very real human world - the realm of our senses, breath, voice, cognition and culture - is but one facet of something vastly greater. All human life and being is inextricably entangled with and suffused by everything else. This broad commonwealth includes every inhabitant of the biosphere: the animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses. It includes the rivers, seas, winds, stones and clouds that support, shake and shadow us. These animate forces, these companions on the great adventure of time and becoming, have much to teach us and have already taught us a great deal. We are who we are because of them, and cannot live without them…

[These] things are beings: not passive props in the drama of our own preoccupations, but active participants in our collective becoming… Everything is really everyone, and all those beings have their own agency, points of view, and forms of life...

[And] Being itself is relational: a matter of interrelationship. All that is required for sticks and stones to leap into life… is our own presence...

There is only nature, in all its eternal flowering, creating microprocessors and datacentres and satellites just as it produced oceans, trees, magpies, il and us. Nature is imagination itself. [Let us] begin to imagine anew, with nature as our co-conspirator: our partner, our comrade and our guide.

James Bridle, from 'Ways of Being'
jamesbridle.com

Photo by Hamish Duncan on Unsplash

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