Cosmic Field, paper collage, 2025

All real living is meeting. – Martin Buber

If you want to create a revolution within yourself, stop treating your environment like an “it”—like it has no soul, like it exists for your use and to satisfy your needs. Try meeting your environment instead and treating it like the living, breathing organism it is. One over which you have a relationship of stewardship, not control.

This is the greatest lesson I learned from transforming my garden into a kind of “habitat”: objectification is a sickness of the spirit. One that breeds isolation, fear, and hostility. It is a trick of the ego and it is reflective not only of our relationship with nature, but, first and foremost, of our relationship with ourselves. That’s something we don’t often think about. 

Do you exist in a relationship of domination with yourself or a relationship of cooperation? Are you someone who is deserving of your own compassion, patience, and understanding? Are you deserving, too, of enjoyment, of rest, of freedom from your own demands and the demands of others? Or do you treat yourself as something that must be disciplined into submission? Something that must be dominated, whose nature must be altered, suppressed, optimized, or re-wired for productivity and performance, like a machine? 

It is my observation that those of us who relate to nature like an object tend to relate to ourselves that way, too. It is also my observation that treating nature like a “you” can help us learn to treat ourselves with an ethos of cooperation and care.

The revolution happens when we look on another creature and see ourselves. That is the moment of relating. That is the moment (to paraphrase Buber) in which a tree is no longer just a tree, in which a bird is no longer just a bird. They are also you. In that moment, we transcend the ego and glimpse the archetypal depths of experience. 

The more of those moments we have and the more we act on them by treating our environment with care, the more radically we shift our mode of relating to the world and to ourselves. “I” becomes someone with whom I walk hand-in-hand, not the enemy within. 

But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-wide dialogue with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partially of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found? – Martin Buber

This is an attitude that extends to other aspects of our daily lives, as well. Do you live in a manner that is personal or impersonal? How do you relate to the tasks you perform everyday? Are you present and attentive? Are you creative? Do you infuse them with spirit, with ritual? Do you, to quote Rollo May, “give content” to your activities? Do you make them mean? Do you elevate them to the level of the symbolic? Or are you detached and inattentive, looking to your environment to lend meaning, substance, and depth to your experience without realizing that generative force comes from within?

Treat your environment like it has soul. And I’m not just talking about nature. I’m talking about everything you do and everything you touch. When faced with a task, even a routine task, ask yourself, “What can I do with this?” How can I make this mine? How can I uncover the inherent worthwhileness of this moment? In answering these questions, we find the extraordinary in the everyday. We transcend the limits of the here-and-now and realize ourselves as universal beings. 

Be creative. Be playful. Be soulful. Be cosmic.