Nature Never Stops

Nature Notes - September 2025

“I have a terrible lucidity at moments when nature is so beautiful, I am not conscious of myself anymore, and the pictures come to me as if in a dream.” - Vincent Van Gogh

- Story by James Inabinet

Live oak blossoms | Ellis Anderson photo

Walking on a sidewalk in Bay St. Louis, I see houses with bushes, mowed grass, drooping live oaks. I see animals, too: mockingbirds and a frog, crows and butterflies. On my right, the terrain slopes downward. There are lots of trees, which contribute to the beauty here. There’s a shrine next to a beautiful drainage ditch where living character actors, animals and plants alike, perform seminal acts of becoming what they are. A noisy crow flies through exuding “crowness;” a grass snake slithers in the grass exuding “snakeness;” living beings, these, simply doing what they are.

Nature Notes
is supported by

​The philosopher Spinoza espoused two ways of looking at nature. One we unthinkingly assume: a created world, finished, static. This is the world we naively see: enduring live oaks, a pair of doves on a wire. If I looked away for a moment and then looked back, nothing much would have changed. The other way of looking at nature is an unfinished world of creating, never static, always “coming to life” moment by moment. With this in mind, I consider the water oak about twenty feet away. Though it appears static, it is actually in a frenetic state of wild, continual change.

Barksdale House, Bay St. Louis | Ellis Anderson photo

Indeed, our tree is kind of like a tornado. A tornado’s funnel is a facade of stability masking continuous turbulent activity. From a distance, the funnel appears somewhat stable and unchanging, but upon close inspection, matter and energy are being wildly funneled through and out, which gives the tornado “life”; remove the flow and it “dies.” There’s nothing stable and unchanging about a tornado. In much the same way, our “stable and unchanging” tree is a hotbed of activity. Matter and energy are flowing in, through, and out – wildly! To stop that process means a dead tree.

In light of this, perhaps we should think of living beings as verbs and not nouns. “Tree” implies something static and made, while “treeing” implies activity–doing tree. Other beings too, might be changed into verbs, from crow to crowing, worm to worming, lizard to lizarding. A sentence so constructed might read: the crowing in the top of the treeing, loudly doing his thing, was oblivious to wormings tunneling underneath in the soiling while a lizarding was crawling about on the treeing trunking. Maybe making sentences like this is not a good idea. 

Eastern tiger swallowtail | Dena Temple photo

We are attracted to nature, and long to be in it. At least some of that attraction, I think, is due to the continual process of self-creation witnessed. The entire forest is alive, the place itself–alive!–and we feel it! Living things grow and change while continuously making themselves. Self-creation is what we see–and feel–when we watch a squirrel run up an oak tree and out onto a tiny limb to grab an acorn before scurrying back to a larger limb to hold and eat it. This is squirrelness in the process of being self-created right before our eyes, out of acorns, sunlight, and water.
​
Physical energy is not the only energy of “life as process.” Spiritual energy is there too, but we don’t see or touch it. We can only feel it, a subtle energy that flows and coalesces around all life. Spiritual energy provides our psychic connection to things, gets us beyond surface appearance into the “within” of the other. This, I think, is why we seek out nature; this process heals us somehow, makes us whole through connection. We feel that spiritual energy when we feel attracted to nature.

Monarch butterfly | Adobe Stock

To “freeze-frame” nature, to stop it, would interdict process. Matter and energy would cease flowing; spiritual energy would cease connecting; we would feel it. [Most] photography stops nature’s flow. When we take a picture of nature, a favorite tree perhaps, we know something’s off. We can’t say why, but we know. We may say something like: “this just doesn’t capture it.” The sculptor Rodin recognized this; he knew that photography couldn’t accurately convey nature: “It is the artist who is truthful, while the photographer is mendacious; for, in reality, time never stops cold.” He was fascinated by the challenge “nature as process” posed, seeking to convey action in his art, though what he was actually working to capture has more to do with spiritual energy, I think, than with anything physical.

Van Gogh was the kind of artist Rodin considered the most truthful and faithful to nature. His cypress trees attract like actual trees. They seem to be in motion–moving, growing, changing–even though they are freeze-framed on the canvas. How can movement be conveyed on canvas? I’m not sure it can be, but what I wonder is what actually seems to be moving, growing? Perhaps this “movement” is more spiritual than physical, and Van Gogh could sense this spiritual reality “as if in a dream” and somehow paint it, capturing the essence of spiritual energy as it animates nature. Van Gogh’s paintings move me like nature does; I am similarly drawn to them. This, I believe, is what we feel in nature that draws us ever closer into her embrace, the spiritual energy that connects and never stops. It attracts us, heals us, and makes us whole–by just being there.

---

Enjoy this feature?