A Natural Life: The Case for Elegant Simplicity

I remember the study of the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, a British classical piece of literature in which the title essentially sums it up. The story revolved around traditional issues of gender, class, status, wealth and inequality during the Regency era. Although fixed in a rural community, there is a lack of any value or virtue in nature, animals, freedoms, liberties or environment. Make note.

There is very little romantic about it, and the rural community seems but a stage for various egos to dramatically display their personal issues and insecurities in a search for self and identity 'only' through a narrow and artificial means of class society. There is plenty involved in the duality of the character personalities, some scrambling for self preservation or match making to secure marriage, with an emphasis on proper grooming preparing one to take ones proper place in British society.

Although it is one of the supposed best sellers of classical literature in the British Common Wealth of colonized nations, it was and still is "mandatory" reading curriculum. To translate, the piece was a class dramatization on how men and women should socially negotiate immersed within a patriarchal class structured society.

You could be sure no classical mandatory empirical novel would popularize any 'Le miserable' stories of the wretched poor lower and middle classes barely surviving on the streets of London among the prostitutes, pubs and classless actors also of the time. I do not recall reading such a story, albeit, the metaphors within Pride and Prejudice were clear enough- the total absence and exclusion of them in any of Jane Austen's novels actually. May I say, "Bravo, Jane, the title fit!"

One should reflect upon this question for a moment. Are we still living in such a time in which archaic elitist societal dominance still dictates our values and virtues? And is it no surprise that so many suffer within the national pandemic of depression, trauma and mental illnesses, taking refuge in a drink, in a pill, gambling, a drug, technology, dehumanizing pornography or even addiction to sex.

Compacted in compartments, within city grids, watching a cube, listening to a cube, googling a cube or playing games with one. Mere refuges, existing as a skip to the small local park or a weekend get away, a society of what so many call zombies, disconnected from nature, environment and nurture like a form of attachment disorder. What is it for which so many suffer and yearn?

It is a pity how the elites of colonization, proprietors of pride and prejudice propaganda have so harshly judged what they know so little of, what we call the first of nations of Indigenous tribes around the world.

Once primitive cultures, as in predating written history, 200,000 years before the earliest agricultural societies of Sumer in Mesopotamia or ancient Egypt, they were diverse peoples living simply... together, among animals, in small communities within the natural environment.

Their beliefs and customs share commonalities of appreciation for the sky, the stars, the seasons, for gathering, even hunting and harvest and living with the pace of nature. They gathered what they required daily and for seasonal sustainability.They enjoyed freedom of space and movement, to migrate and explore.

Remember, nature is where man crawled and took his/her first steps and eventually evolved to develop relationships and learn social skills within a community. They embraced the essence of life, not wandering aimlessly, but developing trade with other tribes. Indigneous cultures also invented unique traditions to their regions, through the story telling of their histories, art, jewelry making, developing unique cuisines and through passionate dances and vibrant body painting and regalia.

Please do not mistake the word primitive as lacking intelligence. In fact it is quite the opposite. Unique Indigenous cultures possessed an 'elegant' intelligence, an awareness of the abundance of life surrounding them, and most of all "respect" for that environment they knew their lives were interdependent upon a symbiosis between man, animals and the biosphere of nature.

There was realization of the interconnectedness existing in life. Tribes developed highly sensitive awareness to weather, animal behavior and communication and their relationship to the environment offered meaning where nature was spirituality for it was the outer expression of the inner. They expressed "respect" for animal life recognizing them as living beings just as themselves and incorporated their personalities into their stories and history, often naming their offspring after them.

For there is a symbiotic intelligence in nature few experience and once immersed within the natural environment for long periods of time, one becomes sensitive to that intelligence. The criticism I may offer for the Gaia Hypothesis is nature does not require humans to remain synergetic, symbiotic or self regulating. Yet humans infringed with that regulation, on multiple levels, stealing the rights of all beings who deserve to be birthed, enjoy a childhood and the adventures of youth, the couplings of love, through the maturity of learned years into that of a wise elder.

Animals, too, experience these transitions in life. But the Indigenous did not require to capture and cage them to realize their cycles were parallel. Animals feel life, they communicate, they demonstrate loss, they experience and express happiness, playfulness and suffering, they also know death. Just as we do.

Even science has proven through the millennia via carbon dating, the planet demonstrates unique cycles of warming and cooling (like life cycles) and continental arrangements very different to our geography today. The Earth cycles and evolves as well. It can also be injured, and now we are all witness to the extinction of animals and life as a result of the industrial revolutions causing climate change.

It is obvious to anyone with perception that the planet perpetuates a system of life physically, chemically and biologically. Science itself would not exist as a scribe, student and witness of the elegant system of life. How many scientists are marveled by the intelligent design, such as the observances of the quantum universe, and all it's genius mysteries mathematics cannot quite explain such as Quantum Entanglement. For the variety of organisms who have ever lived in Earth's time are even more diverse than the types of quantum particles that exist beyond our perception. Each had it's rhythm of life and the Indigenous first peoples of the world stand to this day as witness. Survived.

No elite, hive class, slavery systems or mass genocides of dominating dominion were required. Hoarding was not required, mass murder not required, excessive materialism either. And who claims superior advancement and survival of the fittest exactly? He with the most toys and money still dies and usually sooner than expected.

What intrinsic value or virtue is there to existence without the mutual future of a sustaining healthy planet full of vibrancy and life? Intelligence, simplicity, beauty and elegance have always existed, available to everyone, and is derived from living in balance with nature. Indigenous life was the way of the world for 200,000 years, longer than any civilization in history; most of which repeatedly self destructed as the thousands of archaeological Tells leave their ruins and ghosts behind.

If you told them the truth, ask your children and grand-children what they think?