How to relate to the natural world around us is not a scientific question. It is the most ancient of spiritual issues.

The Buddhists tell it this way: Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of the mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover that there was nothing there to steal.

Ryokan returned and discovered him in the act. “You have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”

The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.

“Poor fellow,” Ryokan mused. “I wish I could give him the beautiful moon.”

Ryokan gave the thief everything he had. What he could not give him—a stark and elemental grasp of nature, an appreciation of the beauty that is life—was what the thief needed most. It is what we may need most as well.

And Jesus said, “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your God in heaven feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”

It’s what we have when we have nothing that defines our relation to nature and the effect of nature on the soul. Then we begin to realize that we do not exist outside of nature or above nature or independent of nature; we are simply its most vulnerable part. What we learn from nature may make the whole difference in the way we go through life, and what we want from it, and what we consider important in it, and—most of all—what we are capable of learning by being alive.

—from Becoming Fully Human by Joan Chittister (Sheed & Ward)