It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out of the ocean 35 trillion yesterdays ago, small and slippery, gills trembling with the shock of air, fins budding feet, limbs growing sinewy and furred, then unfurred, spine unfurling beneath the bone cave housing three pounds of pink flesh laced with one hundred trillion synapses that still sing with pleasure and awe when touched by the wildness of the world. Even as the merchants of silicon and code try to render us disembodied intellects caged behind screens, something in our animal body knows where we came from and where we belong. Gibbons from from Natural History and Illustrations of Mammals by Heinrich Rudolf Schinz, 1824. (Available as a print and a greeting card.)“Our origins are of the earth,” Rachel Carson wrote. “And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.” A century before her, William Henry Hudson (August 4, 1841–August 18, 1922) — another of humanity’s great writers devoted to rewilding the human spirit — captured the essence of what science now calls “soft fascination”: the way our brains and bodies respond when we immerse ourselves in the natural world. In a passage from his altogether wonderful 1893 book Idle Days in Patagonia (public domain), Hudson writes:What has truly entered our soul and become psychical is our environment — that wild nature in which and to which we were born at an inconceivably remote period, and which made us what we are. It is true that we are eminently adaptive, that we have created, and exist in some sort of harmony with new conditions, widely different from those to which we were originally adapted; but the old harmony was infinitely more perfect than the new, and if there be such a thing as historical memory in us, it is not strange that the sweetest moment in any life, pleasant or dreary, should be when Nature draws near to it, and, taking up her neglected instrument, plays a fragment of some ancient melody, long unheard on the earth… Nature has at times this peculiar effect on us, restoring instantaneously the old vanished harmony between organism and environment.Art by Margaret C. Cook for Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)At the end of his life, looking back on how becoming “a better observer” made him “a happier creature,” Hudson writes in his wonderful Book of a Naturalist (public domain):The power, beauty, and grace of the wild creature, its perfect harmony in nature, the exquisite correspondence between organism, form and faculties, and the environment, with the plasticity and intelligence for the readjustment of the vital machinery, daily, hourly, momentarily, to meet all changes in the conditions, all contingencies; and thus, amidst perpetual mutations and conflict with hostile and destructive forces, to perpetuate a form, a type, a species for thousands and millions of years! … [One feels] the wonderfulness and eternal mystery of life itself; this formative, informing energy — this flame that burns in and shines through the case, the habit, which in lighting another dies, and albeit dying yet endures for ever; and the sense, too, that this flame of life was one, and of my kinship with it in all its appearances, in all organic shapes, however different from the human… the roe-deer, the leopard and wild horse, the swallow cleaving the air, the butterfly toying with a flower, and the dragon-fly dreaming on the river; the monster whale, the silver flying-fish, and the nautilus with rose and purple tinted sails spread to the wind.Tuning into this primal resonance between us and the rest of nature is the mightiest act of unselfing I know — a vital quieting of our ruminative self-reference that is the dynamo of most of our suffering. Perhaps to be a happier creature means simply to be more of a creature — a life-form among life-forms, alive only because countless other creatures died along the way to perfect this form in a world that didn’t have to be beautiful, didn’t even have to exist. donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.