“To re-experience the integration of ourselves with nature, we have to take ourselves out of our four walls and set our life-story in the context of nature’s terms. This means becoming especially aware of one area of the natural world – an area that is our listening place, an area where we tune out the old broadcasts of our separateness and retune to the original station of the universal belonging…
In this communion, a further state of belonging may be experienced – initially just in brief glimpses, then sometimes for longer and longer periods – the temporary loss of our sense of identity, a softening of the hard boundaries that separate us from the tree and the animal, from the earth and the sunset. In this condition, we experience ourselves as no different from nature or anything within it. We come into true relationship with nature in such moments, which strip away our hubris, our control, and our feelings of separation and bring us once more under the mantle of the universe.”
Caitlin Matthews
Chorlton Unitarians 