nature's zodiac

The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Romantic Cosmology; The Subjective Individual at the Heart of a Living Cosmos. This book will be available soon! Stay tuned.

Your central role in a living cosmos deeply connects to beauty: your love for it and your willingness to create it.

In his masterpiece, Kosmos, the German polymath, naturalist, and explorer Alexander von Humboldt insisted on an important dual meaning in the Greek word “kosmos.” It translates into both “order of the world” and “the adornment of this universal order.” Beauty, as he saw it, was synonymous with the order of the cosmos. An aesthetic framework was needed to grasp life as a whole. 

As a citizen of the cosmos, you are invited to participate in a cosmic process. You are invited to create order and beauty and also enjoy your creations. In this participation, you discover your central role as an artist in a living, creative cosmos. You are invited to live your art and live it well. 

Pablo Picasso famously said that “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up,”

How can we do this? How can we re-learn this natural way of living, where we create from a real sense of what we love? 

If we look and listen lovingly enough, we can recognize a fundamental axiom of nature: life is best lived as art. Nature is a robust neighborhood of ‘artists’ in courageous pursuits of their ‘art.’ 

A tree’s art is a living structural record of energy that creates a physical foundation for the forest to stabilize, breathe, and share resources. A frog’s art is a vocal and physical frequency that regulates insect populations and transfers energy between water and land to maintain the ecosystem’s balance. The artist, in their unique pursuits and affirmations of their authentic work, contributes to the health of the whole.

As individuals, we are charged with the giant task of constructing a “unified meaningful life” out of the chance events of existence. Sure, we are free to find no harmonies and experience life as a mess of meaningless data points, but where does that leave us? Confused and fragmented. Such a mindset keeps us far from that interrelated forest vibe, where our authentic work affirms us in tandem with the greater whole. 

But if we can manage to reach for coherence like a flower reaches for sunlight, we will remember our romantic roots. If we can begin to shift our mindsets from self-protection to self-expression, we will recall nature’s heroic vibration.