This was an assignment out of the textbook that asked us to write about what nature is to us.

Nature is not what we’ve been conditioned to think it is. It does not mean trees and forests and animals and oceans and jungles. You’d be closer to a metaphorical truth if you said it was the daily struggle for life and death between the wild animals in those places. You’d be even closer if you related the struggle to the cycle of the seasons, or the star-stuff that Carl Sagan says that we are all made of.

Nature is what was begun millions of years ago in the primordial soup, when lightning struck a particular chemical and molecular flavor, and the predecessors to one-celled bacteria began doing their thing. Nature is that one week when god said, “let it be,” and it was, ending with two (or three) humans. Nature is the rolling-up and unrolling that was supposed to happen when enough Native Americans had performed the Ghost Dance. Every creation myth ever written shows us what nature is, and lets it sit there, in the back of our minds, folded up and stashed in an unnameable shape.

Just like life, death, and taxes, nature simply is.