Falling Back in Love with the Wild – Why Our Relationship with Nature Must Come First
- 3 days ago
- 11 min read
Dani Van de Velde is a passionate advocate for living a spiritually aligned life in the modern world. She is a meditation teacher, Reiki Master, psychic medium, and author of Spirited. She is the founder of Spirited Living and Spirited Business online communities, a broadcaster on News for the Soul Radio, and host of The Modern Crone podcast.
What if the environmental crisis is not just ecological, but relational, rooted in a quiet forgetting of our place within the living world? This article invites a return to that connection, exploring how falling back in love with nature may be the most essential step toward both personal and planetary healing.
"You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of interbeing, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer." – Thich Nhat Hanh
The dove on the railing
I was sitting on my terrace recently, meditating in the morning. The intention of my meditation was simply to remember what it felt like to be seven years old.
There is a particular quality of mind that belongs to childhood, a sense that the world is alive, that it is for you. I wanted to find my way back to that. The girl I was at seven moved through the world with the kind of open, wondering attention that spiritual practitioners spend decades trying to recover. I was sitting there, eyes softly closed, breathing, trying to remember her.
Then I heard it. A soft landing on the railing. A pause. And then, unmistakably, that low, rolling coo. I opened my eyes. A spotted-necked dove had settled less than a meter away, staring at me. I held perfectly still, expecting a nervous launch into the sky. But the bird simply stayed, regarding me with one amber eye, and began to coo, unhurried, unbothered, as if we had an appointment.
I had not seen a spotted-necked dove on my terrace before, despite meditating there every morning. Yet here was this bird, appearing at the very moment I was reaching back towards wonder.
What stopped my breath was what came next, a memory. When I was about seven, a spotted-necked dove nested in the flower box just outside my bedroom window. I would wake to its cooing. It was, in the way only childhood things can be, simply part of the soundscape of my world, natural, intimate, unremarkable in the best sense. The sound meant morning. It meant the world was good.
And now, decades later, here was that same species, that same sound, arriving at the precise moment I was trying to return to the consciousness of that girl.
It was as if the dove and I shared something, a thread of continuity that had been running all along, beneath all the adult noise, all the years of not noticing.
This is what I mean when I say our relationship with nature is not incidental to the spiritual life. It is the spiritual life. The wild world is not waiting for us to save it. It is waiting for us to remember it, that it knows us, has always known us, and that the thread between us was never broken. We simply stopped paying attention.
The dove cooed for a while longer. Then it flew away. I sat with a stillness brimming with wonder and innocence, my girlhood returned.
The illusion of separation
We have spent decades telling people to recycle more, fly less, eat less meat, and buy differently. And yet the ecological crisis deepens. The problem, perhaps, is not that we lack the right information or even the right policies, it is that we have lost the right relationship. Before we can act to protect the living world, we must first remember that we belong to it, and further still, fall back in love with it.
The late Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh named the wound precisely. Although we human beings are animals, part of nature, we set ourselves apart from it, thinking of other animals and living beings as "nature" and acting as if we are not part of it. Then we ask ourselves, "How should we deal with nature?" The answer, he said, is that we should deal with it the way we deal with ourselves. We should not harm ourselves or nature.
The dominant Western worldview has long framed nature as a resource, something out there, inert, available for human use. This is not merely philosophically mistaken, it is psychologically catastrophic. When we see ourselves as separate from the natural world, protecting it becomes an obligation rather than an instinct, a sacrifice rather than an act of love. We donate to conservation funds yet feel nothing as we walk through a forest. We sign petitions for rivers we have never stood beside. We may act, but without the love that makes action sustainable.
Thich Nhat Hanh, and all animistic cultures, offered a different vision. The Earth is not merely the environment we live in, we are the Earth, always carrying her within us. We are a living, breathing manifestation of this beautiful and generous planet. This is not a metaphor. Every molecule of water in our bodies once fell as rain. Every breath we take is made possible by forests exhaling oxygen. We are not visitors to this world. We are the world, briefly conscious of itself.
Our bodies already know
Here is what is striking. We do not need to take any of this on faith. Science has been quietly confirming what our bodies have always known, that we are not separate from the natural world, and that proximity to it restores us at a biological level.
The Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, has been extensively studied since the 1980s, when Japan launched a national programme in response to a spike in stress-related illness. The findings are consistent and remarkable. Research across 24 forests in Japan found that even brief time spent among trees, as little as fifteen minutes of walking or simply sitting and looking, produced measurable drops in cortisol levels, blood pressure, and heart rate, while increasing parasympathetic nervous activity, the body's rest and repair state. The nervous system, it turns out, knows exactly where it is. It relaxes in the presence of trees in a way it does not in a laboratory or on a city street.
The effects go deeper than stress relief. Studies show that forest environments increase the activity of natural killer cells, part of the immune system's front line, and reduce markers of inflammation. Trees release volatile organic compounds called phytoncides, which appear to directly influence immune function. Our lungs evolved to breathe forest air. Our nervous systems co-evolved with birdsong, running water, and the movement of leaves. We are not merely comforted by nature, we are regulated by it at a cellular level.
What science is showing us, in other words, is that the body has never forgotten its belonging. The separation was always a story told by the mind, by culture, by economics, and by centuries of treating the natural world as a backdrop and a resource. But strip away that story, stand barefoot on grass or sit beneath a canopy of trees, and something ancient in us responds immediately. The heart rate drops. The breath deepens. The shoulders fall.
The question, then, is not whether we are connected to nature. We are, in every breath, every heartbeat, every strand of DNA. The question is whether we can feel it, whether we can move that knowing from the body into the heart and spirit, where it becomes not just wellness data but wonder, reverence, and love. That is the work. It is not scientific or informational. It is spiritual and relational.
Interbeing: A philosophy for our time
Thich Nhat Hanh coined the term interbeing to describe this radical mutual dependence. "Interbeing is the implicit order," he wrote. "To practice mindfulness and look deeply into the nature of things is to discover the true nature of interbeing. There, we find peace and develop the strength to be in touch with everything. With this understanding, we can easily sustain the work of loving and caring for the Earth and for each other for a long time."
The concept is not uniquely Buddhist. Indigenous cultures worldwide have held this understanding for millennia, rivers as ancestors, mountains as guardians, forests as living sanctuaries of spirit. The Māori concept of mauri, the life force flowing through all living things, the Andean Pachamama, and the Aboriginal sense of country as a living, relational entity, these are not primitive myths. They are sophisticated ecologies of belonging that the modern world is only beginning to rediscover. What is new and remarkable is that this understanding is now finding its way into law.
When countries fall in love with nature
Something extraordinary has been quietly unfolding in courtrooms and parliaments around the world. More than 150 laws worldwide recognize the rights of rivers, forests, oceans, mountains, and all of nature. This movement marks a profound philosophical shift, from treating nature as property to recognizing it as a rights-holding subject, alive and deserving of protection in its own right.
In 2017, after more than a century of Māori advocacy, the Whanganui River in New Zealand became the first river in the modern world to be granted the same legal rights as a human person. The settlement recognizes the river as "an indivisible and living whole comprising the Whanganui River from the mountains to the sea, incorporating its tributaries and its physical and metaphysical elements." Two guardians, one from the Māori community and one from the Crown, now represent the river in all legal matters.
Ecuador led the way at the constitutional level. In 2008, it adopted a constitution that explicitly recognized nature's right to "exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution." This has had real consequences. In 2021, the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court revoked mining permits in Los Cedros, a cloud forest of extraordinary biodiversity in the Andes, asserting that the permits violated not only the rights of local residents but also the rights of the forest itself.
Colombia's Constitutional Court recognized the Atrato River as a legal subject with rights to "protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration," and the country's Supreme Court ruled the Colombian Amazon ecosystem a "subject of rights." In 2024, Colombia went further, passing a law that declared the Ranchería River and its tributaries subjects of rights, accompanied by a comprehensive restoration plan involving local communities.
In 2022, Panama passed sweeping legislation declaring that the environment and its ecosystems, including rivers, forests, and species across the country, are "subjects of rights" with legal standing. That same year, Spain's Mar Menor saltwater lagoon became the first ecosystem in Europe to be granted legal personhood, following years of toxic algal blooms caused by industrial agriculture. The move was pushed through Parliament by grassroots citizen organizations.
The movement is accelerating. In 2024, Peru enshrined the legal rights of stingless bees, the first insects in the world to be granted such rights. Germany's Regional Court recognized the Rights of Nature in a ruling on diesel emissions. Mexico City's Congress recognized the Rights of Nature in its local constitution. At the UN's COP16 biodiversity conference, an Amazon Rights Declaration was formally presented to Colombia's Minister of Environment.
These are not merely legal technicalities. Each one marks a society beginning to remember what Indigenous peoples never forgot, that nature is kin.
Reenchanting our relationship with the wild
Law changes what is permitted, but it cannot, by itself, change how we feel. For that, we need something older and more intimate. We need a re-enchantment, a falling back in love.
Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that we can all feel deep admiration and love when we see the Earth's harmony, elegance, and beauty. A simple cherry blossom branch, the shell of a snail, and the wing of a bat all bear witness to the Earth's masterful creativity. This capacity for wonder is not lost in us. It is merely dormant. And it can be awakened today with very small gestures.
Practice presence in nature, not just recreation. There is a difference between walking through a forest and being with a forest. Slow down. Take off your headphones. Let your senses lead. Notice the specific, unrepeatable quality of this light, this wind, this smell of wet earth. The Zen tradition calls this shoshin, beginner's mind. It invites us to approach the familiar as if for the first time. This is the consciousness of a seven year old. It is available to all of us, at any age, in any patch of green.
Learn the names of things. There is a particular intimacy in knowing the name of the bird singing outside your window, the tree lining your street, and the wild plant growing through the pavement. Naming is a form of acknowledgement. It says, I see you. You are not generic scenery. You are someone.
Adopt a place. Rather than relating to "nature" in the abstract, choose a specific place, such as a patch of parkland, a stretch of river, or a single tree, and return to it regularly across seasons. Notice its changes. Feel yourself changed by it. Indigenous cultures have always understood that the relationship with land is built through sustained, attentive presence, not fleeting encounters.
Practice reciprocity. The trees, the water, and the air ask nothing of us. They simply give. Reciprocity asks what can I give back. This might mean planting, restoring, cleaning, or advocating. But it begins with the inner gesture of gratitude. Many Indigenous traditions begin and end their interactions with the natural world with thanks. This is not superstition. It is sanity.
Let nature speak to you spiritually. Every wisdom tradition, without exception, has turned to the natural world for its deepest teachings. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that birds' songs reveal our true nature. They express joy, beauty, and purity, and evoke in us vitality and love. When we allow nature to be our teacher, not just our resource, something shifts. The categories of "environment" and "self" begin to dissolve. And sometimes, if we are very still, a dove lands on the railing.
The great awakening
When you realize the Earth is so much more than simply your environment, wrote Thich Nhat Hanh, you will be moved to protect her as you would yourself. This is the kind of awareness, the kind of awakening, that we need, and the future of the planet depends on whether we are able to cultivate this insight.
The ecological crisis is, at its deepest level, a spiritual crisis, a crisis of belonging. We have told ourselves a story of separation for so long that we have forgotten it is only a story. Yet the rivers now have lawyers. The forests have guardians. And if we are willing to be still, the wild world will, as it always has, remind us that it is us too.
The invitation is not to save nature but to remember that we are nature. The dove already knows what we are trying to remember.
Every May, I dedicate my goodwill donations to Earth loving causes. This month, I will be supporting Women for Bees, The Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, and the Indonesia Indah Foundation. You can learn more about my impact work here and get in touch to learn more about May events, online and in person, that contribute to our beautiful planet.
Further reading, Thich Nhat Hanh, Love Letter to the Earth 2013 and Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet 2021, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass 2013
Read more from Danielle Van de Velde
Danielle Van de Velde, Meditation Teacher, Reiki Master, Psychic Medium, and Author
Dani Van de Velde is a meditation teacher, Reiki Master, psychic medium, and author of Spirited. She is the founder of the Spirited Living and Spirited Business communities, supporting spiritually aligned growth and conscious leadership. Dani is a broadcaster on News for the Soul Radio and host of The Modern Crone podcast, exploring modern spirituality and embodied wisdom. Her work bridges intuition and everyday life, offering grounded, accessible pathways to self-trust and inner clarity. She is known for a warm, practical approach that honours both the mystical and the real.
Further reading:
Thich Nhat Hanh, Love Letter to the Earth (2013)
Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet (2021)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
