Regardless of where you may find yourself you are always close to nature. Even if you are in a big city or some industrial landscape, nature herself is inescapable because wherever you go you take nature with you. The great winds of the sky blow through your lungs into your body and they dwell inside you. The seas, rivers and streams are always circulating inside your arteries and veins. The rocks and mountains are in your bones and the soil that rests upon them in your flesh. The fires that light up the dark nights or even propel the cars around us are burning deep within our cells driving the life force within, just as the electricity in power cables can be found in our own nerves and brain.
In one of W. B. Yeats’ most popular poems, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, he concludes:
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
W. B. Yeats, whose poetry is full of the hermetic mysteries, knew of the Macrocosm and Microcosm and that the external world of nature was also reflected in the inner world of the “deep heart’s core”. So if we are to live in harmony with nature we must also live in harmony within ourselves as the natural forces inside us which we sense internally are also just as prone to moving out of harmony and out of balance as the Earth’s systems. By listening to the voice of our inner nature we may learn by extension to live harmoniously with the nature surrounding us even in the least “natural” of environments, such as a city with its built landscape, noise, bustle and pollution. It might be difficult however it would do us all good if we could stop and listen for the quiet sounds of nature within the “deep heart’s core” every now and then.
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