Ancient pond
a frog leaps in —
the sound of water
— Matsuo Bashō
Human beings are born into nature. Not only as a species, but as individuals. Our first experience of the world is made of light, warmth, sound, scent. The maternal womb is a living microcosm, fluid, attentive. Even before language, we know the world through our senses. And for millennia, the world has been a natural one. We walked among trees and stones, followed the rhythm of the moons and the sun: nature is not something outside of us. It is within us. We carry its traces on our skin, in our breath, in our dreams—when we still dream of great sea monsters, the ocean, snow, mud, and crystalline water.
We, once hunters and gatherers, later settled down, became farmers, shepherds. And finally, accumulating citizens. Cities have taken over, enclosing us within walls, roles, devices, time measured by obligations and the fear of an empty calendar, seen as an existential failure, a lack of productivity.
We’ve lost connection with that ancient and vital rhythm, with that time that cannot be measured but only felt. Jung wrote that this fracture—between human and nature—is at the root of our deepest existential malaise. And perhaps it’s true: our restlessness is nostalgia. An unspoken desire to return to a home that was never just a place, but a way of being in the world. Jung spoke of the need to integrate our shadows, our archaic roots, our forgotten archetypes. Nature helps us do just that: to reconnect what has been split, to restore the lost unity between body, psyche, and world.
Then illness arrives. Sometimes mild, sometimes devastating. But always capable of interrupting continuity. The body changes, the mind follows, relationships with others shift: they strengthen with a few, weaken with most. Time comes to a halt, and words no longer come—only fragments, in a world made of moments of relief and hours of anxiety and pain.
Many, in the time of illness, instinctively seek the sky, a field, the sea, a forest, water, or even just a balcony full of green and blooming plants. It is not merely an aesthetic gesture, but an existential impulse. In those gestures lies an instinctive call to the cyclical nature of time: on a city balcony, primroses bloom in March, roses in May, geraniums and jasmine in July, and cyclamens and heather in November.
That seasonal cycle, seemingly trivial, is instead the living memory of our deep time. Mircea Eliade reminds us that in archaic cultures, time was not linear but circular, mythical, regenerative. The return of the seasons was not merely agricultural: it was cosmic, spiritual. The cycle offered a continuous possibility of rebirth. So, for us too, every flowering that returns to the balcony is not just botanical: it is a small resurrection of the soul.
In contact with nature—be it forest or balcony—narratives that were once interrupted, chaotic, tired, begin to flow. And to evolve. Where once there were only fragments—something happened, I don’t know who I am anymore, it doesn’t make sense—another form gradually takes shape. The form of a path, of a quest. The pain doesn’t disappear, but it begins to move.
Walking in nature, cultivating it, or simply observing it generates a silent but concrete transformation. Thoughts begin to align. Chaos settles. Emotions find a container. And words, once blocked, begin to rise.
The narrative unrolls through small archetypal fragments that speak for themselves. They are semantic universals. Phrases like I feel, I think, I want, I am changing, I look ahead, someone is with me, this is good, my body now, I want to be heard, I want you to see me, I want you to be near emerge with renewed strength. These are words we find in every language, because they don’t belong to culture, but to humanity. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage, as described by Anna Wierzbicka, shows us that every language in the world contains a common core of original words: words that cannot be explained, only lived. And they are often stored in our body, in our narrative DNA. They are the words we seek and speak when we are in contact with nature. Because nature speaks the same language.
Nature may not heal illness in the clinical sense, but it supports healing in the existential one. Where there is rupture, it can help mend the tear with our roots. Not by returning things to how they were before, but by making change livable. Because the before no longer exists. That golden age, where the body had wider perimeters, has narrowed. But the mind still knows how to travel.
Where once there was only diagnosis, a story opens up. Where there was passivity, a will to search reawakens. There is not always an answer, but there is a question. And the question is what keeps the person, and the narrative, alive.
Nature teaches us that every form lives in transformation. That cycles are not a limit, but a breath. That even in the fall—of leaves, of rain, of the body—there is a deep logic. A beauty. A possibility. Wabi-sabi is a Japanese philosophy that loves the fall of cherry blossoms to the ground: it celebrates impermanence, it honors the wrinkles forming on the faces of the elderly. It cherishes decay and endings, because every ending gives birth to something new.
In the end, true care is a return to the ancestral origins from which we come. Not to what we were, but to what we can still be, in a cyclical time. Nature helps us return—not backward, but inward. It is as if we see ourselves again in a mirror no longer stained, clearer, more transparent.
When illness fragments the narrative, nature can help reopen it. And every story that resumes is a form of healing. Because to return to narrating means to return to living—if not for oneself, then for future generations, in a shared desire for a living and interconnected ecosystem.
