I thought I was One with Nature

Somewhere waaaay back in the family on my mom's side, someone married a full-blooded American Indian.  That means, really I'm as mixed up as any other American.  I blame my crooked and flawed teeth on any English blood in my veins...  you should have seen them before braces!  I blame my HUGE calves and big arms on my German heritage.  I can dig a hole with a shovel like nobody's business, though.  I blame my low levels of alcohol dehydrogenase on my Navtive American genes, but it makes me a cheap drunk.  I will proudly claim my Native American roots when I can harvest a bounty from my garden, spot wild animals no one notices, or when someone compliments my olivey-tan skin in the summer.  What rights do I have to claim these things?  None really.  I am delusional.

I like to think I live in harmony with nature, I'm in tune to the energies of the wild.  I'm laughing at myself as I type this.  Growing up, I lived outdoors, like a wild child.  I climbed our trees, picked up rocks from glacial till, and spent as much time as possible in the woods.  Really it was to avoid getting told what to do.  My parents were really into the "out of sight, out of mind" parenting technique, they were also too lazy to go find us if we didn't answer.  I avoided being picked on by my younger sister, who has been bigger than me since she was four years old.  Her fair and sensitive skin kept her indoors.  Additionally, we didn't have air-conditioning.  It was always much cooler in the woods or up in the branches of a tree where the breeze would blow.  I never thought about why I was out there, I just knew it was better than being at home.

In all the time I traipsed through the woods, dug in the dirt, picked mushrooms, wild berries, collected leaves and seeds, I never once got poison ivy.  I have probably rolled in the stuff.  Just the other day in my yard (which is sort of jungley in parts), I was weeding.  There was a little poison ivy growing, so I pulled it out and put it in the compost.  A day later, a place on my wrist is red and raised with tiny blisters.  It itches like nothing I've ever known.  It is relentless, it is poison ivy.  Ugh.  Wow.  I always thought folks who got poison ivy were just lamenting for the drama of it all.  I understand now.  Nature, why hast thou forsaken me?

As we age do we become more philosophical?  Maybe so, or maybe our brains just grow up and we start thinking rationally.  I dropped the righteous religious beliefs I was taught all my childhood in just the last 8 years.  I realized they were a heavy burden.  Is there really someone watching us all the time?  Are we really that self-involved that we would think there is a being observing, interceding for us, and ultimately judging our fate?  That's what we have blogs for nowadays.  I think it sounds silly, the universe is too big and the possibilities are too numerous to even bother with.  So, I decided that my religion is nature.  What else tangible do we have anyway?  I don't need proof, but I am practical or maybe just lazy.  I stripped it down to the basics:  we are born, we live, and we die.  Our bodies decompose as microorganisms feed on them, then something eats them, and then something else eats them....  you get it.  Eventually our parts become part of something else.  That actually makes me feel a lot better than going to heaven to eternally worship the lord (yawn), or be condemned to hell--what kind of person dreamed this up?  It seems constructed just to keep people on the right side of the law.  Right side is used loosely here.

I harbor no ill-will toward anyone with religious beliefs....  as long as they don't keep urging me on towards the "light" after I have politely stated that I am not interested.  We all die with our own stupid beliefs, right?  I am not forcing Nature on anyone else...  Nature pretty much does that on her own.  I don't think the question "but where did nature come from?" is even anything for us to worry about.  Who cares?  Enjoy your life, be kind to others, take only what you need so that there will be something left for the next.