No, I Don’t Worship Nature

As a Participant in Nature’s Continuing Creation, many people call me a “Nature worshipper.” No, I am not a Nature worshipper.  I don’t pray to Nature, perform any sacrifices to Nature, nor do I cast spells or dance around a campfire. Rather, Nature, along with Reason and Science, provide me with the meaning and purpose of my life.

Here are four favorite nature quotations of mine:

“Everything is flowing — going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water…  the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks… While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood… in Nature’s warm heart.”
— John Muir, pioneering American naturalist, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)

“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”
— Frank Lloyd Wright, pioneering American architect

“We are not the masters of nature that we thought ourselves; we are as dependent on the rest of life as are the tree leaves or midges or fish.  We are part of the system.  One way to put it is that the Earth is a loosely formed, spherical organism, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis.  We are, in this view, neither owners nor operators; at best, we might see ourselves as traveling tissue specialized for receiving information – perhaps, in the best of all possible worlds, functioning as a nervous system of the whole being.”
— Dr. Lewis Thomas, American physician; author of Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

“If those bloody humans can’t keep the bees alive, I reckon they don’t need the flowers and berries anymore either!”
— “Mother Nature”… from her new book, “Now I’m Really Pissed Off! “