In this modern age, very little remains that is real. Night has been banished, so have the cold, the wind, and the stars. They have all been neutralised: the rhythm of life itself is obscured. Everything goes so fast, and makes so much noise … .*
Gaston Rebuffat

Work provides safety. To define work in other ways than safety is to risk our illusions of immunity in the one organised area of life where we seem to keep nature and the world at bay.**
David Whyte

We are nature:
Though we may create our illusions of distinctiveness,
Isolating ourselves from the natural world,
We do so at our peril;
As Tanqigcaq discovered for herself in the ancient northern story
of the sealwoman who has her sealskin stolen
by the man she has agreed to be with to alleviate his loneliness.

As the years extend, without her sealskin she is unable to return to the sea,
Her skin begins to flake,
Her eyes dull, she becomes dangerously thin;
But the sealwoman is saved by their son Ooruk
who accidentally comes upon her hidden sealskin
and returns it to her,
And she slips back into her natural world.

Like the old, lonely man,
The unnatural, modern world promises many things
to our detriment,
But within each of us is Ooruk,
Making it possible to reconnect with the natural world
of stars and cold and wind –
But also sunshine warmth and sweet breezes.

We do not have to be in nature for long
before our bodies respond positively –
Our thinking self might try to tell us another story,
But take a moment longer to notice how
your body responds to sunshine or rain,
The trees and plants;
Outside is always just beyond our door,
And we don’t have to climb mountains or swim rivers
in order to benefit from reconnecting
with our true nature –
It may be a gaze upwards, nurturing a window box,
Finding the local parks and walkways.


The life we receive is not short, but we make it so,
nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it.^

*Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places;
**David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
^Seneca, from Victor Strecher’s Life on Purpose.