On this island, there is no Wi-Fi, but there is a different kind of connection. The morning glory vines that crawl over my driftwood shelter are not "plants." They are relatives. When it rains, I do not run for cover; I stand in the downpour and remember that I am 70% water. This is the first lesson of : You are not in nature. You are nature, aware of itself.
I have begun to keep a journal on the back of a salvaged life raft diagram, using charcoal from burned mangrove roots. Today’s entry is simple: The tide brings. The tide takes. I am the thing in between. On a desert island, the ego dies a slow, sunburned death. In society, I was a collection of résumés, anxieties, and social masks. Here, I am simply a vertebrate trying to find lunch.
This is the asceticism that no cathedral could enforce. The silence here is not empty; it is a pressure . It presses against my eardrums until I can hear the clicking of a hermit crab’s legs, the subsonic groan of coral growing, the whisper of sand shifting under the moon’s gravity. Holy Nature - Enature - On The Desert Island -1...
There is a moment, after the roar of the sea has swallowed the last echo of the engine, when you realize you are not stranded. You are planted .
The First Entry: Waking Up to the Cathedral of Silence By an Anonymous Castaway On this island, there is no Wi-Fi, but
Theologians speak of Mysterium Tremendum —the terrifying, fascinating mystery of the divine. I have found it inside a sea turtle’s eye. I have found it in the geometry of a spiral shell. I have found it in the moment when a school of silverfish leaps from the water simultaneously, a liquid explosion of syncopated life.
Holy Nature includes the fang. It includes the rot. It includes the parasitic worm and the bone-dry drought. On this island, I have learned to say "Amen" to the mosquito as well as the sunset. This is the hardest lesson: The sacred is not comfortable. This is the first lesson of : You are not in nature
This is the first entry of what I have come to call my Enature —a word that did not exist in my old vocabulary. In the city, we had ‘nature’ as a concept, a postcard, a weekend escape. But here, on this desert island, Nature is not a backdrop. It is a person, a force, a liturgy. I am learning to spell it with a silent, holy reverence: .