Sacred Mountains

Plants, animals, minerals, nature seduces us each day a little more.

Microcosmos, March of the Penguins, The Blue Planet, The White Planet, Snow Dogs, Winged Migration, Earth from Above… are as many zooms on nature that reveal its strengths and its beauty, its power to make us happy and admiring.

Everything or only part of earth, water, air is its own small universe moved by a irremediable desire for life.

I thirst for this nature, in pursuit of space, of time, of silence, of purity, of beauty, of the sea or the mountains, of the forest or of the countryside.

Nature allows me to breath, to relax, to balance my internal clock, to laugh, to bring about emotions and opens myself up to contemplation. It allows me to live the present in harmony with myself and the environment. My need to stay in touch with it is for me therefore essential.

 

Survival

Nature can at all time become hostile. I tangled with and I was forced to put myself in a situation of survival. Those who have lived this type of experience know that one has to adapt to nature and respect it in order to survive in a difficult environment.

I remember having encountered particularly difficult, even dangerous conditions, while I was cross-country skiing in Corsica. It is indeed a very beautiful trek that is carried out from February to March and from Calvi to Zonza across that particular mountain, a gem of nature, in the Mediterranean Sea. The men and the material suffered a great deal regarding this rigorous climate, it was an itinerary difficult to find, some refuges were unattended… in particular during one especially difficult lap, as we had thick fog and when we thought that the building of a makeshift bivouac would be  necessary as night and the cold was setting in…

 

Wrath

Nature can unleash its anger. Cyclones, tidal waves, tsunamis, flooding, avalanches, storms, earthquakes, fires are as many battering that mankind is unable to control.

Indeed, mankind is unable to fight against natural elements; it’s an illusion to believe it. Nevertheless, taking this dimension into account helps mankind to better protect itself by and exposing itself less to natural phenomena.  One has “To deal with Nature” and not just settle down anywhere or anyhow, when one realizes after a natural disaster (in fact one should remove the word “disaster”), it is the damages the ones that are disastrous. It is mandatory to educate populations on those issues and not make believe, the way it has been done so far, that we are able to “domesticate” nature.

However, by modeling our elderly who built our old Europe, we can see that is it possible to develop our urban and country planning in a way to protect ourselves against the wrath of nature. Also is it mandatory that objective research keeps on warning us on global warming, the ozone layer, the CO2 emissions and pollution. And that necessary steps, on a planetary level are being taken, for the survival of mankind… or are we entering a new cycle?…

 

Respect

And if this nature is allowed to unleash itself, becoming at times difficult to control, it still imposes mankind respect, because without this very Nature mankind doesn’t exist anymore. The air, water, food that Nature is producing, is as we all know, indispensable to our survival and to our balance.

This requires necessarily protection of the environment and a respect for ecology.

In her book “Biomimetics” the Canadian naturist Janine Benuys indiquates: in order to invent the human being the laboratory of nature has worked during almost four billion years, ending up with a tremendous biodiversity that we are far from having understood. Without that complicity, mankind cannot subsist. We therefore live in a very critical period, since biodiversity is in free fall everywhere in the world. Even so we sense the natural events differently depending on our cultural heritage; it remains indisputable that one needs to know how to preserve Nature in its complexity and its fragile balance.” One needs to know how to look at it, to listen to it, to respect it. And not trying to control it, to garden it, to neutralize it… in to order to continue the evolution that begun several billion years ago.

Pierre Rabhi (Frenchman born in the Sahara in 1936, farmer in the Ardèche see bibliographie) sees it this way: “Nature is blind and indifferent only to those who don’t listen to it. Do we need it?  Without any doubt, yes. Does it need us? “

This is an excellent subject of philosophy?!  Don’t you think! I let you ponder over it…

 

Take a look at the series of pictures that I have selected for you showing the landscapes of the coastlines, the mountains, the countryside, the gardens, and the rivers… with its living beings: plants and animals… showing simply this biodiversity at hand of these modest samples.