image by Jeff Kubina

Going through a tunnel not too long ago I had an odd, beautiful experience. I realized that the tunnel I was in, the mountain through which it carved, the dynamite that blasted it, and the person who had the idea to go through the mountain instead of around it, were all flowerings of the same thing. Spirit, the universe, nature, God, pick your term—whatever you call it, the same force that pushed those peaks hundreds of feet up into the sky also led to my being there at that moment, in a car going 60 miles an hour through the mountain’s heart.

In that moment, I felt it in my bones—we are not separate from nature. We were created by its workings, and as we express our desire to grow and evolve and create the new, we express nature’s own desire to do the same.

It’s a fashionable notion right now that humans are merely pants-wearing, big-brain-having, problem-causing animals, and all that is true. But we are also much more, because we can see and understand and contribute to this process of flowering and growth in a way that no other animal can. Through these abilities we have become evolution, exploration, and possibility are made flesh.

When we discover the laws of the material universe by learning how matter behaves and how to manipulate it, we are also discovering what the universe wants. Atoms want to have full electron shells, flowers bend toward the sunlight they crave, and humans seek ever more complex, elegant, and moral solutions. At every level these desires show us what the universe itself seeks.

Understanding that we are not separate from the world—that in fact we are its most conscious flowerings—changes everything. We are freed from guilt, and we see that there’s nothing inherently wrong with us. We’re not doomed, flawed, or a cancer on the planet.

And we don’t have to be scared of the future—it is ours to create, by nature’s design! On the deepest level, there’s no difference between what we want and what the universe wants as a whole. We are part of an unending, unfolding process which has given us many gifts precisely so that we can use them. As we bring the fullness of our capacities to bear—imagination, intellect, understanding—we travel further in the direction of what we crave, and so does the process itself.