Why Is It Hard to Find Connection with Nature and Feel Its Presence?

Listening to birdsong, looking at leaves, plants, and flowers, feeling beauty. Why is something so ordinary so difficult?

My previous article, “How Connection Breaks: From Innate Wholeness to Loneliness and Confusion,” described how children, with their vitality still intact, often have simple connections with their parents, animals, nature, and themselves, and how, along the way, they lose their sense of connection with themselves, their parents, other people, nature, and society.

An online reader wrote “Looking Back on My 35-Year Journey of Leaving and Returning to Nature,” documenting the typical experience of small-town exam grinders like me: leaving the countryside at seven for a cleaner city, unaware that this meant saying goodbye to nature for more than a decade and entering an adolescence and early adulthood marked by socialization, alienation, thinness and impoverishment, one-dimensionality, and a single system of values.

This article systematically addresses connection with nature.

I. Seeking too much outside yourself makes it hard to establish a connection with the present.

When the self is not robust, with many unresolved issues and many karmic obstructions, we seek outside ourselves and in distant places. We cannot practice living in the present or establish a connection with the present—with ourselves as we are right now.

II. Lacking a connection with unconditional nature

1. Unremarkable little patches of nature:

In northern regions where vegetation is sparse, small-town exam grinders in school uniforms, with their hair cropped short, look at the dusty-looking evergreen hedges on and around campus and the thin, newly planted roadside trees. It is hard to develop a sense of connection.

1. Exquisite, expensive little patches of nature:

The ornamental plants and crowded popular parks of first-tier cities also make it rather hard to feel a connection. Instead, they can easily stir up “the ego, attachment to the self, the notion of self, and the notion of sentient beings.” The flowers, plants, and parks are too exquisite, the trees too orderly, the human intervention too obvious. They constantly remind people how much nearby homes and rents cost for someone to enjoy an atmosphere like this.

An online reader wrote in “Why Hangzhou’s West Lake and Beijing’s Olympic Forest Park Feel Less Healing to Me Than a Small County Town’s Park”: By West Lake, I always think, West Lake is so beautiful, so special—it certainly lives up to its name. And what conditions did I, an exam grinder from a rural small town, have to meet to be able to get here?

1. In a small county town in Yunnan, I saw plants growing freely and ordinary people with innate wholeness: unconditional existence and the beauty of connection

It was only after making my way to Yunnan. In a small county town’s park, I do not think about what “conditions” I need to meet. The ordinary people in the park, dressed simply, also tell me that everything is in unconditional harmony. I see nature, trees, leaves, birds, fish, flowers, dead branches, fallen leaves, and clouds. I immerse myself in the details and in the whole. No notion of self, no notion of “park.”

1. Rural children and nature

One great advantage rural children have is their connection with nature. Children are very small, and nature is very big. Children spend a great deal of time growing up in nature and know that a single tree is a whole world, home to countless ants, little insects, birds, grasses, and mosses.

In the past, there were few lights in the countryside, and the connection with the starry sky and the universe was deep too.

Many small-town exam grinders, because of trauma from their families of origin or their surroundings, or the compulsion to compete endlessly, have severed their connections with the countryside and farmers, coming to loathe and reject rural life. This is a great pity: as they lose their own roots, they also lose several major connections—with other people, the people, society, history, nature, and the universe.

III. The malaise of spiritual-practice elitism: feeling superior and lonely while appreciating flowers, plants, and nature

When many people connect with nature and feel beauty in spring flowers, snow, and moonlight, they do not experience a sense of unity between humanity and nature. Instead, arrogance and loneliness arise at the same time. They believe that only they—and a select few others—can appreciate this tranquility and beauty, with their artistic capacity, aesthetic sensibility, spiritual attainment, and level of understanding. They become absorbed in the ego, admiring their own rarefied taste.

This is because the karmic obstructions of drawing distinctions, arrogance, and superiority run too deep. Their connections with other people and ordinary people have broken, worsening their unresolved issues around loneliness.

When connecting with nature, recognize that you could connect with it as a child too. It is not that you can connect only now because you have grown older, stronger, and more aesthetically discerning. In fact, you are still not as capable of it now as you were in childhood.

Sense the innate wholeness and deep capacities of mind in every child and ordinary person. Break free of spiritual-practice elitism.