As soon as we complain about the caprices and hardships of nature, we exchange nature for human compulsion. From tempest, drought, mudslide, flood and extremes of temperature, the complaints accelerate to the unyielding earth, the unproductive, earth, the earth ripe for exploiting. And so follows civilization’s course: mining, logging, draining, filling, dumping, runoff, chemical agriculture, pollution. Because these actions require organization, money, and motive, soon concentration of power and authority are compelling not only nature but people to change, alter, adapt, renounce, resign themselves, give up simpler lives and patterns of living. From a harmonious relationship with nature to an antagonistic one, from a relative individuality for all to a collectivity for most — this is the long-term result of our complaints against nature.
This is the economic and social history of most of the world, the core of what is called “development.” No wonder ancient peoples from Chinese to Native Americans were loath to disturb mountains or change the course of rivers or hew forests when they were believed to be occupied by supernatural beings. No such restraint hinders moderns. From nature and the solitary to domination of both nature and solitaries.
It is not a matter of living in wilderness. Early hermits could afford to; modern hermits are more often urban dwellers. But as the natural world is assaulted mercilessly by moderns, a big piece of that eremitism is assaulted, too, by the arrogance of power and the demand for renouncing values precious to the individual, values not merely symbolized by but actively represented by nature and its cycles. All of us — but especially the solitary — must monitor our relationship to the natural world in order to recover the purest sense of harmony with universe and self.
journal of reflections by the resident of the Hermitary