By nature we mean the mountains, plains, rivers, beaches, and oceans that are visible to the 4500 species of mammals and 10,000 species of birds.  Nature is revealed to us through movement into it and movement with it.  Moving with the falling leaves in the autumn winds in the mountains under the drifting or gathering clouds.  Moving through the savannah and the forest with the winds, ascending the mountains with the mists, drifting down the rivers.  Moving with the herds of wildebeests, zebras, and impalas in the Serenghetti.  Soaring on a paraglider in the thermals with the vultures.  Swung by the surge in the ocean with the coral fish.  To go to nature is to greet all the oryx and squirrels and hummingbirds and moths with passionate kisses of parting.  It is to build nothing, to manipulate nothing, to collect nothing.  

We go off, to the nearby or far-off forests, to the mountains, the glaciers, the beaches, the oceans.  Look at our feet, Bruce Chatwin said, they are long and set parallel; they are made to move on ahead.  We make our way with the antelopes and the eagles across mountains and continents as the continental plates collide and buckle up these mountains that freeze the west winds and dry out these deserts.  We descend with the voles and the lizards into the Grand Canyon and the Quebrada de Humahuaca treading the eons that deposited these fifty strata of petrified sediment.  In the crystal nights of deserts and mountains our gaze travels with the migrating birds the light-years of the stars.  We visit excavations and monitor the millions of years from algae to dinosaurs.  We trip through the savannah with the wildebeest and the impalas and stroll the beach tacking the waves with the plovers. 

Stepping across the splashes of tinted light in forests we fine-tune to the scale of the rustling leaves and the silence plucked with the small songs of shy insects and birds.  Climbing the mountains we step into the winds and onto the immemorial stillness or imminent freefall of the stones.  Diving the oceans we abandon the movements of the human upright posture and steer in the surge with our fins like the fish.  We find ourselves welcome in the penguin rookeries of Antarctica as long as we pick up the movements, concentrations, currents of the colony and do not come with the movements of predator orcas or skuas. 

Our minds no longer grasp, appropriate, collect, legislate; they become rushes and rhythms and flows.  They join the birds in the sky.  “Our own ideas move” Paul Shephard wrote, “through the velvet cranial spaces as unpredictably as the passage of herons or the brief flash of a startled deer at twilight. . . .  They flit through consciousness, . . . are attended to momentarily, and in a flash are gone.”