A wise man once said...

“But listen to me, my people, we are now being confronted with a race – that was small and weak, when our fathers first met it, but now it is big and pretentious.

Strangely enough, they love to cultivate the ground, and the pleasure of possession is among them like an illness.

They are claiming mother earth as their own and they are driving away their neighbors.

They are blemishing the earth with their buildings and their garbage.

This nation is like a spring flood, which floods its banks and destroys everything in its path.

With them we cannot live side by side.” (Quote, translated from: erinnern und urteilen)

These words were said by “Sitting Bull”, the chief of the Dakota-Sioux in 1877.

It was the time when settlers from Europe flocked to the United States like swarms of birds migrating to the south.

They usurped the land and killed the natives or forced them to live in reserves,

because they somehow thought that they were entitled to suppress them and claim the land that they had found as their own.

The lifestyles and beliefs of the European settlers and the Natives differed greatly.

The Natives lived with the rhythm of nature.

They lived off the land, ate what grew each season and hunted animals.

They built housing and made clothes (if they wore any) and weapons, as well as medicine with what they found in nature.

They did not have clocks or the concept of “time”.

They believed in spirits, they believed that the first Indians on the land had changed into trees, animals, rivers and all the other nature around them.

The European settlers were already a competitive and industrially orientated nation. They had jobs and clocks and the desire to own things.

They built houses and weapons that were made from compounds that weren’t a raw product of nature.

They did not live in the same harmony with nature that the Natives did and somehow felt like they had the right to exert their imagined superiority over the people that had lived on that land for ages.

In history there have been countless of these incidents.

The “man” from the industrial nations takes over and brutally undermines and dispels ancient tribes and nations that live life in a simpler way that not knows the ongoing competition for possession and power,

the pollution and exploitation of the natural world,

the stresses of jobs, saving time and “getting the most” out of every invention and raw material there is.

I am not saying that our world is bad and evil with not a glimmer of good.

Our world has beautiful nature and joy and incredible people.

But, there is so much ancient knowledge about medicine, nature, harmony and life that is not bound to our often really stressful and harming ways of how we live life in the industrial nations.

And every time, we build a new highway, cut down a forest for alien agriculture or office buildings,

we are brutally enforcing our self-constructed belief that we are somehow superior and entitled to those actions without regards for the rest of the natural world.

But let me ask you,

When the last tree is cut down, when you cannot swim in a lake anymore that is not polluted and when snow is something that you can only keep pictures and memories of-

is it worth it?

The house, job, car, reputation, degree, vacation trips, brand clothing,...

The concrete buildings standing in endless blocks next to each other that house politicians that sign any bill but one that will protect our planet,

lawyers that represent companies who are everything a forest animals would be afraid of,and keepers of unenjoyable jobs in steel cubicles.

In the natural world those things don’t mean anything, and often don’t even bring any pleasure, health or fulfillment to the ones that exercise them.

But what does have meaning is:

farmers, that get up with the sun and grow produce organically and passionately on nutrient dense soil on a field next to his his own freely roaming animals.

But not having: three cars and a huge house full of electric devices, heaters, clothes and expensive furniture that was all produced by the use of atomic energy,

paid with money from jobs that do nothing to support or heal our natural world.

Instead, stepping out into the snow on Christmas morning and knowing you can have a turkey on Christmas that is free of antibiotics and steroids and comes from a farm surrounded by open field and trees, powered by the force of nature.

💕That is what matters truly in the heart of all people.

And there is no other way, because we come from nature.

It is there in the clear scientifically supported evidence - for all the skeptics-

🌱that having only a view of trees in a hospital, enables a patient to recover quicker.

🌱That standing in a forest or sticking our hands in soil calms us.

💚The problem is just that our societies have distanced and disconnected themselves from nature and don’t see it as the essence of their lives anymore and don’t listen to what nature has to say.

We have to learn to listen to that voice again.

🌷And I can guarantee you, that if you open yourself up to it and learn to let in again, that it will enrich your life and nurture your soul and body every way that not much else can.