Touch Grass

By Erik Hogan

Subtly, the smell of rain infused darkness infiltrates with a whisper that something has happened. An excitement over storms unremembered in the night, now gone, perhaps never were, but for the evidence of a wet world lingering out there in obscurity before the dawn. The smell of rain. Memory of a dream materialized in wakefulness.

Clouds hang low, gracing treetops as the flat light of day advances. The endless succession of torrid summer days is now broken by the rain, even if just for this day. Mist is palpable on the skin. Almost cool… almost.

The earth is still. Quiet, but for a singular birdsong. Unacknowledged. Lonely. And the unmowed grasses stand chest high on the hillside. All wet, as I soon will be walking through.

Submerging into the grasses, looking up at stalks and seeds impressed upon the grey sky. Water droplets glistening on green blades, shining like infinate small portions of the universe turned inside out. Glowing from within. The vibrancy of enveloping aliveness in the field is palpable on the skin. Almost transcendent… almost.

A vigorous exhale and a burst through the brush. Bedded deer, alarmed and springy. She leaps up, away, but my attention is down. Down at the damp soil. Down at the small blooming things below. Down to the roots of things. Roots where the earthworms thrive and where both the deer and I will one day come to rest. Roots that give rise to the grasses and trees that will then draw us up from the cleansing dirt and release us to the wind.

Spiderwebs display ensnared constellations of dew. Galaxies on patterns of silken thread, each bright star containing a reflection of the one observing it.

The ancient Stoics had a belief in the Logos. This can be thought of as a divine force of reason that exists in all things. It is ever-present in all of nature. Human consciousness is a spark of this divine reason, this Logos, that exists within all of us. It is the rationale that the Stoics had for saying that, even when circumstances apparently do not go our way, nature is benevolent.

Modern approaches to Stoicism often focus on the ethics while glazing over this part of it. It is too mystical, perhaps too religious, for modern tastes. Dismissing it may be a detriment, however. Perhaps we can accommodate the essence of the idea while making adjustments grounded on modern scientific understanding?

We might view the Logos as simply the laws of nature. Though we might not, even today, have a clear understanding of them, they exist consistently throughout all of existence. In that sense they are rational.

These natural laws have created conditions that allow for life to exist on earth. And, since its inception, have shaped life into the form it must take in order to continue that existence through the processes of natural selection and evolution. Human beings have been crafted by this same process. Our adaptation to the laws and conditions we have been presented with have evolved into our divine spark of rationality. So, we can truly say that we are inherently a part of nature itself.

But is nature and it’s laws really benevolent? Perhaps so, just in the sense that it provides conditions that allow for continued existence in the first place. Whether we make the most of the opportunities presented is entirely up to us.

With this in mind, it must be said that nature is not always nice. This is as true for individuals as it is for species vying for survival. Walking through tall wet grass on a July morning leads to wet shoes, wet pants. There will be ticks.

But what an experience like this offers is a connection to reality that reaches to our core. The grass, the rain, the soil, the spiderwebs, the deer. Me. We are all expressions of the same natural law, the same Logos, each in our own way. We are nature and we are one.

I am struck by the gravity the modern world places on technology. The digital, online world. The looming paradigm shift of AI. We are offered the siren’s song of comfort, ease, endless pleasure of dopamine hit by way of endless scrolling. And the promise of fortunes by wrapping ourselves in this digital mantle.

Madness, all of it. The digital world is not the real world, despite how much we are convinced of its utility. There will never be and can never be a true connection with humans and this technology.

The connection is there in nature. We just have to open our eyes and choose to see it. It may involve the discomfort of walking through wet grass in the humid July air and the acceptance of the fear of missing out on the hot topics in the electronic world. But in the end all of that is a substrate of 1’s and 0’s amounting to nothing tangible in the end.

I choose the discomfort of belonging to the natural world. Maybe that recognition makes any concern over the use of AI just noise, because it is all irrelevant to my existence.

Perhaps I just need to touch grass.

Erik Hogan is an Athens police officer whose photography focuses on capturing the beauty of nature.