Tell us what nature means to you.

My refuge.

“You cannot go against nature
Because when you do
Go against nature
It`s part of nature too
Our little lives get complicated
It`s a simple thing
Simple as a flower
And that`s a complicated thing”

The sum of all the physical laws of the universe, the current geological formations and the net affect of all the flora and fauna in any particular environment.

Anything humans haven’t screwed with.

Essence, core.

As in “It is a cat’s nature to hunt bird’s and mice”

Or for scorpions to sting frogs that were nice enough to give them a ride across a river.

Did I need a spoiler alert for that?

Above all other things, tranquility.

Beauty, energy, love, life.

Vicious; red in tooth and claw.

Read some Darwin, you hippies.

Aside from survival of the fittest, nature to me is the absence of man’s influence….raw natural beauty. Even a little prairie can be a sanctuary away from the plastic world I live in. Throw in a little river or lake, a few deer, a mountain or ocean, some song birds and that to me is what nature is all about!

Nature is my haven.

Beauty, silence, peace.

I am very spoiled in my space over here, and right now it means another glorious naked deckside shower on this hot early eve. before I throw myself in the cool hot tub with the tree frogs. lol

I believe nature to be existence that is relevant to life. This includes humans, and all we do.

Life is nature, and nature is life.

One big cosmic smorgasbord of magic.

Sometimes I play a game with myself sitting outside counting as many different plants and species as I notice, as they show up.

Right now I am admiring my giant Mules Ear weed that I refuse to cut down on the edge of the gully below my deck. It is about 5 feet tall and staring to bloom one giant spike of yellow flowers. It found the perfect place to grow in the runoff from the water sources in the corral where my geese live.

I love my cool crazy weed! lol

I would be lost without it.

@jonsblond

How could you be lost when you ARE nature? lol

I know what you mean. ;-)

@Coloma I know you do. I’m not a city girl. ;)

To me, Nature is pretty much everything. From plants, animals, insects, Earth, and the Cosmos. It’s easy to point to certain things, like a tree or a newborn, and see Nature directly; but it can even be seen in a discarded candy wrapper on the ground. The things that led up to the production of candy, with the appeal of the taste to sweet, to the capitalistic society that supports mass produced, corn syrup-sweetened, individually-wrapped treats (and the advertising to go along with it), and the lazy, careless, or accidental way of discarding the wrapper illustrates some of the varied nature of people… as well as the way we judge it to be “good” or “bad”.

I think the word ‘nature’ should be banned: it encourages hippies and doesn’t actually have a determinable meaning anyway; much like ‘God’ or ‘fate’ or…

you get the picture.

@the100thmonkey Banning words only give them more foolish meaning. Reclaim popular words that have fallen to foolish meanings by using them in practical ways.

@zophu:

1. You’re taking me waaaaay too seriously.
2. I don’t need to reclaim the word ‘nature’ – it means nothing.

@the100thmonkey I was only taking what you said seriously, trust me. turned that shit around on you! :)

@zophu: fair enough.

Do you have a referent for the noun or not?

BAN IT!

To me it’s just heaven. :D It’s clean and pure and uncorrupted and beautiful. Sometimes a little cruel, but otherwise i think it shows you life ought to be and how we’ve complicated things for ourselves.
It’s somewhere i can relax and just marvel at it’s beauty. :)

I had to look it up in the dictionary recently, just to feel that it was the right word to describe what I was after. It was. Essence, the absolute identity of something at its core. The essential, the natural, native… Living. Not divorced or separate from humans, we are of nature ourselves.

If beings from other worlds rocked up, they too would be of nature and by the same definition have nature of their own. Stones, bugs, water, quarks, me, you and him and her, we’re all nature. Natural? Now that’s another thing altogether!