Wounds
Robert White, Compleat Discourse of Wounds (1678).
Sofia Luna December 10, 2024
For most of human existence, our wounds signified that we were part of the natural world. They wrote the story of life without separation as we not only blended into, but were an active part of the ecosystem. Last week, noticing a boy having breakfast with his mother rocking a severely bruised eye, it felt like a novelty. In a modern, western world, physical wounds and battle scars have all but disappeared from everyday reality. What, I wondered, are the global repercussions of the sterilisation of our physical plane?
We no longer walk through irregular terrains filled with natural pigments, or scramble over cliffs with battered bodies. We construct buildings to keep nature out and monuments to hold our ambitions together. We walk with slicked back hair, and polished suits through angular concrete landscapes. We refine and decorate our avatars, surgically 'enhance' our geometries, and homogenise the surface of our lives and our bodies the same way we do to our walls. We call this progress. Beneath our skin, though, lies irregularity—festering deep, invisible wounds, not of flesh but of spirit.
In the gradual fabrication of the modern metropolis, we transferred our bodily wounds to earth. To her soil, her small ferns, to past predators, waters, rivers, and birds—not realising that they too, give us life. We looked away from the damage caused as we dreamt of a human centric world, building structures to keep dangers out. And they did but the fact that wounds incrementally disappeared from the visual field made it really difficult for us to track what was hazardous to our new existence.
As our infrastructures mutated, so did our wounds, but our definitions of danger stayed the same. Only in cases of mass destruction or abuse in focused areas are we able to look from afar and say “yes, there is a problem we need to work on!”.That which invisibly infects the collective beyond time and space is really hard to put a finger on, and so is difficult to heal. Consequently, moving from tiger scratches 20,000 years ago to inexplicable spirit aches have left us living "in a space without a map," as Joanna Macy remarked.
Few of us could survive in a forest right now, but we need not be that adventurous—a lot of humans can't even deal with free time at home. We require constant stimulation, and have become completely averse to the uncharted. We follow paths that have been clearly traced before in fear of getting lost. Is this a place worth existing in? A lot of people have started to realise it is not and I have witnessed the ample collective inkling that we should recalculate our relationship with the world and ourselves.
“Wounds are holes, holes are doors, doors into something, openings, where, if we choose to enter them, the person that walks out is not the same who walked in.”
We have been so isolated from nature that we don't even consider its absence as one of the causes for global unsettlement or the sharp rises in anxiety, loneliness, depression and spiritual voids that so many of us experience. Isn't she Mother Earth? We are the child that has cut their parent off and have been left traumatised.
We talk about rewilding gardens but it is time to talk about rewilding society. We are hungry for something that was taken from us. When certain religions first appeared, they replaced our connection to the wild with a relationship to something more abstract. Slowly we have been extracted out of the symbiotic relationship we had with our planet, as institutions of belief arranged themselves on top of everything and everyone as the source. Religion replaced nature. It reasoned with the invisible and colonised our imagination for the past millennia. Thank God, time, and the increasing access to information, that what was hiding underneath—the incoherence, the imposed patriarchy, intolerance, and the general abuse of power that was then mimicked by corporations— was exposed. Today, younger generations are unsubscribing from this expired belief system and in that process have started seeking something else. Many of us are returning back to nature, to our nature.
Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602)
Hosting Shinrin-Yoku experiences (the science backed Japanese practice of Forest Bathing, known to balance the body and mind) one quickly sees how fulfilling, cleansing, healing, energising, and surprisingly simple the practice feels when all you do is walk through a forest, fully present, without the intrusion of technology. This evidence shows how much nature feels like home—how nurturing she is, how much our bodies need her, and yet, how absent she is in modern cities.
I have found that the more I heal my insides, the closer I feel to the natural world, the more natural it feels to live in this world, and the more I unearth my own self and the old memories of the soul. Wounds are holes, holes are doors, doors into something, openings, where, if we choose to enter them, the person that walks out is not the same who walked in. Unhealed wounds propagate, the same way good energy creates more good energy and healed wounds attract healed people. There is no need to try and save the entire world, because the entire world is simply the one You inhabit—you choose what to do with it.
I write this to speak into reality a transformation, I believe, is happening to many. We are interconnected, and in this floating rock, no one experiences anything alone, the Human Experience is shared. Regardless of the 'never-ending horrors', we are on our way back to nature. And Nature is not just a tree, a fish and a squirrel. Nature is you, in essence. Nature is beauty, it is The Grand, it is Vast. It is Vital, it is Infinite, it is Eternally Alive. It is Robust, Real, Complex. It is Us. It is also everything we are not right now, and everything we are becoming.
Sofia Luna explores and builds tools that facilitate this time's modern cognitive shift. She is a Colombian artist, creative consultant, entrepreneur and imaginator living In The Middle of The Future.
