Biophilia, meaning the
sentiment of love toward all
life in the whole
biosphere, or the whole of
nature, if one prefers... A feeling of
empathy towards all
lifeforms and the wilderness where the
diversity is greatest.
I'm quite familiar with this, both from an academic and a more personal outlook. Academically, I audited a class at UMass's College of Food and Natural Resources given by Stephen Kellert. I went to the lecture fully expecting him (based on the posters posted around campus) to be a quack; I was pleasantly surprised to discover otherwise.
I would assume the personal form to be generated as "biophile", and that I am. Lake Celeste probably was primarily responsible -- from age 3 to 10, I spent the majority of summer nights sleeping outdoors in a hammock; wandering the myriad trails through the forest...
The high desert of the Denver area, while starkly beautiful, seemed deadly to me. Bryce and Zion Nat'l parks inspired similar feelings in me when I visited them years ago. I can well imagine millenia-old ghosts whispering down canyons, barred forever from the barren earth.
There’s so much I notice in the world that I want to share. Shadows on the ground. Shadows of grass and clovers against the sidewalk -- nobody cares about these things, it seems. I see these things and am nearly crying sometimes with the beauty of them… even in this horrible place, New Jersey.. Playing with the showerhead this morning, pushing the stream up against the wall and watching how individual rivulets of water would interact, holding it at different distances and angles watching it make microfountains, oscillating, seeing the different waveforms as each intersected the other, creating a pulsating where there was none, as each arriving wavefront would reinforce or cancel the one before...
I was in New York City the day before yesterday to have dim sum with a friend. I am incapable of fathoming the kind of mind that can survive in such a place; the noise, filth, smell, and in general the teeming huddled refuse-tossing masses... when I'd finished there, I drove to the Delaware Water Gap state park, walked about 2 miles into the woods, and stretched out under a tree on a blanket until the sun set.