I love nature. Somehow, traditional Chinese landscape painting, which I began to study in college, Tang Dynasty poems, and hiking in beautiful places like Point Reyes National Seashore felt so right to me. Like my explorations of practice, I didn’t know what I was doing at first. I was merely following “what I liked.” Only later did I realize that everything was of a piece.
I was repeatedly drawn to streams. Somehow, watching the water flow over rock soothed me. The water had its course and nothing could deter it for long. If blocked, it merely pooled until it flowed around the obstacle. At the same time, the rock seemed implacable in the water, cold, and wind. Moss may have grown on them, trees may have fallen onto them, but the same rocks remained every time I visited. The stream represented what I would eventually seek: the flowing adaptability of water combined with the independent strength of rock.
Decades later, I can look back and see all the lessons I was searching for. I am not a lone person in the world. I am of the world.
It’s easy to get confused about this. From a Daoist viewpoint, I am a part of nature and nature is in me. I no longer see myself as the guy who drove to the wilderness, parked his car in a lot, and hiked out to “visit.”
I do avoid the silly rationalization that since people are a part of nature then everything people do is natural. It usually isn’t. Why? Because humans are the only creatures that have the option to separate themselves from the natural. We impose our wills on the land through industrialization and technology. We pollute the earth. We heat the atmosphere. We think that the earth is dumb wilderness and imagine it as the blank canvas for our ambition. We think we can find achievement without consequences. Or rather, we have tunnel vision aimed at profit, satisfaction, admiration, and expanding egos.
The Daoist continually talk of plain simplicity, that means being unadorned and returning to the state of our natural selves. Plain simplicity means to your natural self. That precludes the elaborate forms we mold ourselves into as we pursue our ambitions.
What about martial arts? Isn’t that adding elaboration? No. It is a process of undoing, of clearing away clutter. Fear, clumsiness, a polluted body, being stiff or overweight for my frame all need martial arts to clear away. I am not adding. I am restoring.
The Daoist say that a person is a microcosm of the universe. Adding human conceptions blocks that. I practice, reminding myself that nature is the setting for all that I am.