Step 5: Seclusion, Intuition, Metamorphoses

With Earthen bass tones and vibrant rhythms, the prog band Yes leads the celebration of nature and life in sound. Album artist Roger Dean helps guide the way:

The magic of Dean's artwork is not in the detail. The reality of the paintings are intensified to the viewer who understands the natural feeling of spaciousness in the vast scope of surreal landscapes. The art is transcendent just like the utopian flora that serves to imprint its glory within the human heart and mind.

Here is the true dilemma. The human race has gone from 100% hunter-gatherers in the prime of its origins to 0% in the years of the industrial empire's expansion. Nicholas Roukes in his cryptic "Art Synectics" explains it best:

“Having created his own environment apart from nature, man has grown insensitive to the subtle changes and signals (biological messages that are perceived by every organism in nature, including man: perceived through senses by means of light, color, temperature, taste, touch, smell, sound and behavior)."

To rub salt in the wounds of our natural loss is the capitalist framework of society. Early sociologist Max Weber, writes:

"Materialist goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. No one knows who will live in this materialist cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise."

The battle has been raging since the industrial empire's inception. Armed with an arsenal of creative wordplay, emotional resonance, metaphors and synectics, the resistance to industrial expansion was waged by the 1800s-era realist, naturalist, and transcendentalist writers as a necessary force for combatting the increasing loss of natural environments and human instincts. 

Going nomadic means taking the bare essentials, renouncing society for a short or long period of time, absorbing the clash of the elements, building stamina and endurance, living vegetatively, and cleansing your mortality with increased instincts. Once you are bestowed with the skills of a forager- a unique element integrated into the forests and plains- you are ready to breathe anew the complex patchwork of life:

Spilling incredible evolving interactions onto the page, M. C. Escher has captured in his "Metamorphoses" (above) what Latin poets since 0 AD (See Ovid's epic intermeshing hundreds-of-thousand word poem Metamorphoses) have struggled to do: capture the profound brilliance of nature's limitless connections. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes of the connections gathered by intuition:

“For if in any matter we can simulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature; the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and metamorphosis is possible."
Henry David Thoreau spoke thoreaully of this in his 1845 work "Walden," which probes the depths of gathering intuition by living in seclusion. He writes:"Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness... we must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features."

With this in mind, recent studies are showing that Nature Is Nourishment. The results of a University of Michigan test proved that the human memory improved when the subject was placed in a natural environment over subjects that were confined to an urban environment. Similar studies prove that jail cell windows with natural settings outside reduced the need for health care. 

Humankind is given nature, in its ultimate chaos, to garner mammal instincts at his primal level, and endless inspiration from the grand integration of species and sensations at his most brilliant levels. The future between Earthen Man's untouched environment and Materialist Man's destructive indulgences hinges on the delicate balance of nature-infusing art. Today's artistic battalion includes the subjects explored below.

Sub Templum.