It's alive! Nature, I mean. You may have known it all along, or perhaps you're stumped when I say that. The rock under your feet may seem inert and dead. Crystals are pretty and that's just that. The trees are doing their growing thing and that's nice because we love shade and timber. Or you may be on a different path. If you have animals you know that they have a soul, feelings, character, and you love your pet as if it were your child. Perhaps you've experienced crystal healing, or you talk to your plants and nurture your garden.
For several hundred years scientists could not have ventured to say something about Nature's inherent intelligence without being discredited. We deemed indigenous people, who always believed in Nature's sacredness and aliveness, beneath our scientifically oriented "enlightened" mind.
But science is only true science if we ask all questions and leave the answers to our inquiries open instead of trying to prove what we want confirmed because it conveniently fits within our thinking. Things shifted a bit with James Lovelock's Gaia Theory in the 1970s, but now the tides are really turning. "We are transitioning into the reality where everything's alive," author Charles Eisenstein noted. When your houseplants thrive because you talk to them, maybe it's not an accident that they look beautiful and lush. When you harvest steadily, Nature picks up on it and produces more, summarizing the gist of Robin Wall Kimmerer's scientific research in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. Trees are not only connected under the earth via the mycorrhizal mushroom network, something of a botanical nutrient and information internet, they also nurture, help, send information, cooperate, and protect each other, as Smithsonian Magazine explains in an article about the work of tree researcher Peter Wohlleben.
Nature's intelligence imbues everything, is all pervasive, and we're part of it, not apart from it, as Fritjof Capra and the Francesco Varela/Humberto Maturana team have maintained for years. Recognition of this intelligence that's all around us and in us, is us, leads to a greater respect for nature, a spirit of cooperation with it, awe for its beauty and perfection, and openness to learning from it and being inspired. We thought we knew (almost) everything. But the more we open our mind to Nature's miraculousness and intelligence, the more we discover that we still know so little, that there is so much more to discover, and that life becomes more fabulous the more we pursue this direction.