Where Is Here?

My back door opens onto a little patio, where a lizard just scampered by.

What do I care? The lizard is “wildlife.” A separate category from my life. Some little thing doing whatever it’s doing and then disappearing.

I can keep sipping my coffee. I can go about my morning, make a phone call, get to work on something important, or go for a walk down the asphalt street.

I don’t have to identify the kind of lizard it is. I don’t have to wonder if it could bite me. Or if I could bite it as part of my first meal for the day. I don’t have to notice its pace, whether a snake might be close behind. Whether its behavior is odd in some other way that might matter to me.

The lizard and I are unrelated. It may as well be on a TV screen. TV screens are flat and smooth. Nothing smells or truly threatens. I can turn them off.

Then I can wander to the fridge. It will be well-lit. But that doesn’t matter. The food inside won’t challenge me. It won’t try to elude me or even make me reach very far. I could grab some sliced turkey in the dark.

Nothing around me forces me to pay attention.

How did I get here?

My ancestors came to the east coast of North America from Europe. Other people already lived here, of course. People who lived with lizards in a different way.

My ancestors, though, set about recreating what they’d known in Europe.

They built things that were fundamentally different from what was all around them—from the mess of twigs and soil beneath their feet; from the morphing strands and blooms of the clouds above their heads; from the roughness of the moss-ragged trees and lichen-splotched boulders that surrounded them.

To build something, you have to first imagine it. Europeans had long ago imagined a realm that was different from nature. Then they built that realm. Then they lived in it.

The realm my ancestors recreated wasn’t like anything that greeted them on the wild shores of Massachusetts. It was cleaner, more understandable, more geometric, more predictable.

They built houses according to this vision. The surfaces were smooth. The lines were straight. The corners were sharp. You don’t find those things in nature.

They built streets that flattened and covered the complexity of the ground—the dried leaves, bugs, rocks, and roots.

They cleared fields and planted one kind of plant in rows. They separated these crops from the surrounding fields and forests, where a riot of plants grew next to, around, and on top of one other.

They forgot the act of imagination that lay behind all this labor. How monumental that act was. What humans existed in—everything that surrounded and held them—could be partitioned off. It could be called something separate from them.

“Nature” had been invented: a place that could be visited when it suited us.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of their physical senses, nature was not home. Nature was the house next door. With those strange people living in it. The ones you weren’t sure about. You thanked God for your fence.

Native Americans did not undertake this monumental project. They didn’t imagine a realm apart. The way the world seemed to be was the way they allowed it to remain—endlessly intricate, rough-edged, nuanced, massive, dazzling, and enigmatic.

They didn’t labor to separate themselves from this world. They allowed it to move above, around, under, and through them—the way the wind moves through the leaves of a tree. Many tribes lacked a word for “nature” as something separate from them. The closest synonym for some was “all my relations.”

Native American living spaces were less removed from those relations. Dirt floors, rough-hewn logs, shaggy moss, animal hides, and clay bricks all remained indoors with them.

When they stepped outside, their feet met the earth. All their relations crowded to greet them—trees, leaves, bugs, birds, soil, the weather.

Even Native American agriculture was more integrated with the surrounding fields and forests than its European counterpart.

Once we imagined a tidy and predictable realm for ourselves, nature became something that didn’t belong there. We could curse the ants that crawled across our countertop. Nature could become alien to us. Something to fear, subdue, or idealize.

Native Americans didn’t bother imagining this separation. The ants, then, didn’t bother them either. Not enough to call an exterminator anyway.

What my ancestors experienced as alien, Native Americans experienced as simply how things are.

They knew that how things are is never smooth, straight, or clean. That it never does the same thing twice—not exactly. That it is endless detail and variation. That its colors blend, its corners disintegrate, and its perimeters decay into never-ending fractals.

What was true for Native Americans was true for all tribal peoples everywhere. Even for my very earliest ancestors, before the word Europe even existed.

We all come from people who felt the mud and the mountains, the forests and the fields, the wind and the water as a house with many mansions, big enough for themselves as well as their extended family. None of our ancestors, really, were separate from nature.

Nor am I, really, separate now from the lizard that scurries across my patio.

Further Reading:

Of Geometry & Jesus: Essays from Outside the Fishbowl of Western Civilization, by Chris Spark

The Science Spell: Why Science Can Coexist With Spirituality, by Chris Spark

Saving the Appearances, by Owen Barfield

The Philosopher’s Secret Fire, by Patrick Harpur