Rhyan Harrison Martin Bell Reflection

During this article, Ball talks on the ideas that nature or sacred places may not be alive in themselves, but contain living things within them, giving them a type of breath, and a key difference between a living place and a non-living place. The living place containing “living” things such as humans or other animals, and a non-living place not containing either. Ball argues that these places in themselves are not alive, i.e, they cannot breath, speak, give information, or many other things that we think about when we consider what life is. In some areas, I agree with this. I do agree that these areas are not alive in the same way that we would think of humans as being alive, however, I cannot say that nature and places in nature are not alive in any way.

Now, what we do know is that the people of oral traditions would not think of nature in the same way we do. For them, there is no separation for what is nature and what is not like there is for us, For us, nature is outside and we are inside, separated from nature in our homes that we have decided in our own frame of mind, are not nature, but rather something separate. Nature to us is the wild, the untamed, the undeveloped, untouched by human development. For those of oral tradition, there is no such distinction. They live symbiotically with what we call nature, and do not separate themselves from it as we do. This raises a question for me, can we as modern people that have separated themselves from nature in such a way truly ever be able to connect with what we consider nature in the same way as the people that practiced these primal religions? In my opinion, probably not. We are wired to see nature and developed areas as two different places, two different entities, and as completely separated. To be able to throw that notion away and become truly one with nature in the same way would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible. How would one even go about doing that?

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