When it starts to rain, you take notice into your nature, even if it’s for a split second.
While you’re working at your desk, protected from the elements by a thick masonry wall or just by a rose tinted office glass window, you hear the jibber jabber of the birds and animals. And why not to engage in talks of the rain and tell every soul about it? They predicted it first. You could have predicted the arrival of the rain too, but you were busy with your daily deliverables to your boss, because you know she doesn’t care about the damn rain. Your species was once an animal, but now you’re striving to run further from it, immersing your head in piles of paperwork, wearing the finest ironed vests, and looking intelligent.
After all, the heavens showed the signs of it nearly an hour ago. The chickens were clucking, the common swift was harshly chirping, and the cats and dogs were running around, pushing along the skimpy road, which was still muddy from yesterday’s rain episode. They knew that it was going to rain cats and dogs again.
A banana shoot was planted in the soil in a backyard full of chickweeds just last month, July. A shoot without any visible nodules, high surface area green leaves, or any hope. This month in August, there are three solid leaves, all healthy green and no yellows. From no leaf, to a leaf who has learnt to arch his entire back to withstand the pressure of the rain and helps his little sibling leaflets to grow as big as himself. A person would have a midriff, the banana rather has a long primary stem.
Life often stems from places where there was no hope before.
If you have heard of Studio Ghibli movies, you might have heard of Miyazaki, the director of all those wonderful, dreamy yet unsettling movies, all of whose backdrops seem to be in some sort of a Japanese cherry blossom fairytale, where the river glistens like pearls floating on it, and the mountain roars to keep you away from it as a cautionary tale.
The studio has a themed park built after it. It’s called the Studio Ghibli park. Someone who has watched at least two Ghibli movies would imagine in their head for a start that their park would be nothing short of the Disneyland in Tokyo, if not more. But in reality, no one expected Miyazaki to do what he did with this themed forest.
If you were to walk in without watching reviews of the park online, you would walk yourself into a steadily growing confusion when you visit the Ghibli park. Why? You’d expect rollercoasters and joyrides and towers crashing into the water, but you’ll be met with none.
“Why would I buy expensive tickets to a place that doesn’t even have a ride for a child?”, you might ask. That’s the whole point of Ghibli movies and this Ghibli-themed park, originality and simplicity. Miyazaki makes you pay for a park, and gives you exactly that - a park. Except that this park isn’t full of masonry and fountains and show-offs, it’s just nature and a reference or two if you are a Ghibli fan and can spot them, like Mei and Satsuki’s house set in the medieval times, or Kaonashi in the train.
Humanity’s entire goal was to be a part of nature. Human is a subset of animal. Animal is a subset of nature. But if you look at ourselves, we don’t want anything to do with nature. We want to buy soil and pour concrete over it. We want not to walk on the concrete either, so we tile and grout it. Now we can’t walk on that either, so we buy ourselves nice shoes. But those ones pinch, so we buy even nicer ones. We exclaim not when we see a monkey play with its friends by hanging off a branch, but when certain numbers on a screen go up which helps us to keep buying more shoes.
Of course, we are animals. But we want to be untameable animals. While it’s easy to admire a Royal Bengal in a zoo, or showing off your bravery by roaring and whistling at the animal, it’s not easy on the heart to walk into a tiger’s enclosure even with a tranquilizer gun in your hand and five more humans having your back.
We are not animals ‘yet’, because we don’t trust each other even though we have the gift of language, a thousand lie detector tests, and millions of years of archaeological proof. We are arrogant and hence behind.
Some of us are terrified of our jobs, and what could happen if we stopped doing them. After defying the caste and slavery systems, we became slaves to different ones - most of them electronic and powerless without a charging schedule. We provide them power, liven them up, and allow them to power is down. As a result, we are struggling to understand ourselves. We are letting our brains become aftermaths of marketing. Why are we doing this? Are we too afraid of our own power, and what we could accomplish as outcasts without devices halting our responses with constant dopamine? Or are we afraid that in reality we are masked copycats and can create nothing meaningful without aid or theft?
Our attention span has dipped, our stress levels are steep curves, and sleep is a stranger to our lives. Therapy is for the rich, substance abuse is for the rest. And the best part which makes us human? Blaming everything else apart from ourselves for being the terrible source of this misery we are in. Being in denial and being oblivious to our pain never helped anyone. It’s time to pull up our own socks, letting ourselves be pulled into the wet, rainy embrace of nature, and letting our devices run out of charge before we do.
A lot of growing to do. Maybe reconnecting with nature could help. It’s raining now and we are animals without umbrellas and shelters. The next thing to a cool, musty smelling petrichor? Taking off your clothes and slowly making your way to a shower with cool, cool water that splashes over your head in tiny, steady trinkets and attempts to wet your hot headed hair.
As close as you can get to nature without public nudity.