Nature can act as a conduit.
Requiring a kind of peripheral vision and a generosity of mentality, an unmediated glimpse of nature can occasionally transport us out of the mundane to a place before thought or even feeling. Here, we experience a moment of unevaluated, unencumbered, rhapsodic life. As a culture, our relationship with nature is highly mediated. Yet, we buy into the romantic notion that wild nature brings us closer to divinity and wholeness, still influenced by the 19th-century ideas of writers like Thoreau and Wordsworth. For the majority of us living in the 21st century, however, our interaction with nature involves the controlled and manipulated landscape that surrounds our dwellings and our places of employment, recreation, and worship.