If angels represent one enduring source of non-human nurture, the living world itself offers another. Nature is essential and trustworthy for us, because we are a part of the fabric of the natural world.
In times when human culture feels disordered or dangerous, the natural world becomes a steady teacher and stabilizer.
The trees do not panic. Rivers flow with a constant ease. Snow-covered land brightens and beautifies. Nature holds a different timeline, one that reminds us that life renews itself through cycles of rest, decay, and return.
When we turn our attention toward animals, plants, forests, and waters, our bodies often relax before our minds understand why.
In his recent book, Francis Weller draws on a striking insight from biologist Paul Shepard, who writes:
“The grief and sense of loss, that we often attribute to a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness, where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.”
Shepard points to nature as that “beautiful and strange otherness.” This names something many of us feel but rarely articulate. Often, we mistake anxiety, grief, and disorientation as personal failures, when they are actually signs of our estrangement from the spiritual and natural worlds.
We were never meant to be sustained by human relationships and human systems alone. We were meant to be shaped by seasons, weather, wildness, and the quiet companionship of other living beings.
When we consciously rely on the nurture of nature - through walking, sitting outdoors, tending a garden, watching snowfall, or simply noticing a tree - we begin to heal this estrangement.
Nature teaches patience, impermanence, resilience, and belonging without demanding anything in return.
Like angels, nature reorients us. It shifts our gaze from our personal preoccupations to the larger patterns of life that hold us. It places our lives, and the world, in a wider frame. It reminds us that while humans may dominate headlines, we are threads in a much larger weaving.
Together, nature and angels form a kind of sacred, interconnected support system - one grounded in earth and in Spirit. In turning toward these trustworthy wellsprings, we anchor ourselves more surely in the the worlds of nature and Spirit. We learn how to remain present within them. We are guided to find our place and role in the order of things. And we are steadied by beauty, and nurtured beyond what human hands and hearts alone can provide.