What’s your attitude to nature and why should we think about it?

Earlier, we talked about the seven attitudes to nature in this video short:

But what resonates with me more is that they don’t tell the whole picture. We’re not tied to one thing – We have different attitudes at different situations in day to day lives. That’s why there are high and low points, or two extremes, for each attitude, and that’s what brings us more self awareness.

So here’s part 2 of the seven attitudes to nature. You can watch the video, or read the post below.

First, there’s seeing nature as a resource to be exploited. At a low point of this attitude, we experience that as self-interest, and only interested in my own self need. At a high point however, it is to share that natural resource with others. It is at this high point that we might break into the next attitude, which is a higher awareness, and that is seeing nature as objects to investigate.

The lower extreme of this is being hyper active and super focused on making discoveries, perhaps like a mad scientist. The high point is to become respectful of nature, perhaps from all the new discoveries we’ve observed.

Once again, at the high point, we break into the 3rd level of awareness, seeing nature as beings that mirror our own suffering. The low extreme of this is being very emotional and projecting our own emotions onto nature, which does remind me of my teenage and early adult years. The high extreme of this romantic tendency is aspiring to understand and also love nature.

Which brings us to the 4th level of attitude –seeing nature as beings to take care of. With love, at a low point we’re still kind of projecting our own self love and our own personality, but at a high point, it is the love of nature as they are. You can think of this as the difference between loving sunny days because they’re beautiful and hating rainy days because they’re inconvenient—this part of our emotion is coming from self love. If we love nature of its own, we’re more likely to see the beauty of rainy days outside of our human experience. Although the dislike is still very legitimate, we can feel contradicting emotions at the same time. 

This type of love brings us to the 5th attitude, seeing nature as a source of power. The low point of this is wanting to exploit and manipulate the power of nature, and the high point of this attitude is experiencing it as a catalyst of creativity and inspiration. So welcoming its power, but not trying to control it or own it..

That brings us to the 6th attitude, seeing nature as simply living beings. At the lower extreme, we can consider human as the ultimate living being, very dogmatic and self-centered, but at the high point, we consider LIFE itself as the ultimate existence, a bit removed from our human individuality and centeredness.

That brings us to the 7th attitude, seeing nature as a part of the cosmic whole. At the low point, we pity ourselves and focus on how insignificant we are. But at the high point, we are ready to sacrifice and dedicate ourselves to the service of life. 

What I think of this categorization

Now I’ll say, when I first read about this, I thought having a spiritual connection to nature would of course bring me to the highest awareness, but not only am I far from that, I also have some reserve about how I would describe that level of awareness. I think ultimately, really embracing ourselves as a part of the universe means we’re not above any other types of life or nature. That will for sure contradict with how I fight to stay alive, and that’s why when we’re willing to sacrifice our comfort and our habits of how things have always been, that is sacrifice to serving the bigger picture of life. 

That being a somewhat unattainable level of awareness is not a bad thing–they are good questions to reflect on and can guide our decisions. 

My own experience with different attitudes

I think the low and high extremes of these attitudes are very interesting and mostly very relatable. I don’t know about you, but I grew into awareness of nature maybe in my early twenties. They were everywhere around me when I was a kid, but I wasn’t aware. And when the awareness developed, I think I was very much a romantic. The folklores, the fantasy and magical side of nature was true to some extent, but also not very grounded. In the later years I started developing awareness of the first and second attitudes–seeing nature as scientific objects as well as valuable resources. And those are very important parts of having a spiritual connection to nature. 

Why I’m sharing this information from the book

The reason I want to share this information from the book The Healing Energies of Trees is because it covers such a broad spectrum that I think almost anyone can find something they can relate to, whether you’re a mystic or a farmer or both. The publisher of this book might not be around anymore, and I don’t see any further work by this author, but there’s so much work being done by so many people, I think there’s enough of us sharing our experiences and discoveries to deepen our relationship with nature. 

It was fun absorbing and sharing this information with you. If there are more topics you’d like to hear about, leave it in the comments and subscribe to my channel!