I really love the way Alan Watts describes Nature in this short passage from "Conversation with myself", Essential lectures, Program 12 - 1971 (link).
"Human beings are just as wiggly as nature. And our brains are an incredible mess of wiggles, and that’s the part of ourselves that we understand least of all.
I’m afraid the problem is partly due to Mr. Euclid, who invented geometry, because he didn’t really measure the Earth. He measured and gave us ideas about the very simple forms in his own mind.
And perhaps we should come to the conclusion that he really had rather a weak intellect. Because sometimes, when I’m in the middle of all of this, I feel as if I were in the middle of an amazing brain.
In other words, the brain is a network of interconnected neurons, and each one of those neurons is a fairly simple affair, because it either fires or it doesn’t fire. It gives you the message on or off, or yes or no.
But what we call things—the plants, birds, trees—are far more complicated than a neuron, and there are billions of them. And they are all living together in a network.
Just as there is an interdependence of flowers and bees: where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees there are no flowers.
They’re really one organism.
And so, in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else. So it’s interconnected. And so the many, many patterns of interconnections lock it all together into a unity which is, however, much too complicated for us to think about except in very, very simple, crude ways."
Alan Watts
