(This essay was first given as a sermon at Bell Street Chapel in Providence, RI on 3/29/2026 for a joint Nature-service with Clara Hardy).
I’d like to start with a question.
What’s your favorite color?
If we surveyed everyone here this morning I’m confident we would see amongst us a preference for every color of the rainbow. Our personal aesthetics help define what colors we prefer of course: we like what we like. Many people believe that we all have corresponding colors, colors attached to us by way of our auras. Some people claim that they can see people’s auras, halos of color that surround us, and people have different colors based on who they are, their intentions, their personalities.
Whatever your aesthetic and whichever your aura, despite what your preference might be, I’m here to tell you that your favorite color is green.
That is to say although our individual minds might have their opinions, our bodies all agree. Green is the color that we would find it very hard to live without. Green calms us while at the same time stimulates us. It relaxes us while at the same time stirs our creativity. It draws us in while at the same time let’s us be. It will calm you when you’re anxious and motivate you when you’re tired. On a more practical level green nourishes us in the two most fundamental ways possible: it provides us food to eat and oxygen to breath.
Green is a gift from plants to us. I mean this as literally as a statement like that can allow.
Within white light is hidden the full spectrum of colors, the full palette of the rainbow. Each of these colors has a corresponding energy related to its wavelength and frequency. The visual spectrum (that is visable to human beings) falls between 400 nm, being purple and 700 nm, being red. If you picture yourself pulling apart a slinky about a foot or so that could represent the red spectrum of light. If you relaxed it about six inches than it could correspond to the violet/purple spectrum. If you pulled even further than you would be representing a wavelength more like a radio wave than visible light.
As wavelengths get shorter their frequency increases and so have higher energy content. This is why ultra-violet light and x-rays are more dangerous to us: they have shorter wavelengths and thus higher frequencies and so pound us with energy.
You can also think of these light waves as being like a radio signal. Each color has a different corresponding signal. Like a radio antenna plants use molecules called chlorophyll to capture, harness, and engage with light.
Plants use the energy within the visible light spectrum they capture to perform photosynthesis. Plants harness the energy of light, the energy of the sun, primarily along the purple and red ends of the spectrum. The energy of these colors provide the oomph, like a hammer hitting the launch pad of a carnival bell tower that drives the process of photosynthesis, which eventually provides the planet with free oxygen and digestible carbon (aka food).
An extraordinary thing about this light-harnessing process is that the one color that plants do not use is green. That is to say plants don’t have an antennae for green light waves. Instead of absorbing green, like the plant does with the other colors, it reflects it back to us. The plant doesn’t need it so it gives it away, like a gift. It’s always amazing me to think that the color we most associate with plants is the one color they do not relate to.
People have a bad, though forgivable habit of ‘othering’ Nature. Nature is not someplace you drive to or go to for some kind of psychological benefit. Everything that we can ever know is Nature. The oak tree is Nature, the AI program is Nature, the photosynthesizing plant is Nature, you and I are Nature. There is nothing above or beyond nature, nothing super-natural. All that is is all that is. (I use a broad definition of Nature, which includes such esoteric phenomenon as clairvoyance, reincarnation, and so on. If these things occur than they are no less natural than gravity).
This might sound pedantic and literal but it’s important. Our concept of Nature or natural often excludes us. It is a thing or place that we drop into and then leave, hoping to glean some sort of benefit from. It’s important to remember that our environment, the natural systems around us, these places that we drive or walk to and live among, are wholly influenced by our presence, the presence of human beings. I do not just mean the more dramatic changes in the landscape that have come from the result of the industrial revolution. Wherever and whenever people have gathered they have changed the landscape, often dramatically. Sometimes the changes are similar to the beneficial, healthy ways the beaver changes their environment, sometimes in unhealthy ways.
Take what is now the northeastern United States. Our landscape has changed dramatically over the last four hundred years since the colonial period began yet it was not, as in the popular imagination, an “untouched” wilderness preceding Europeans. The indigenous peoples of what is now southern New England managed their environment intensely and in a way modern people would find extremely invasive. Native Americans used fire to clear land, creating what early colonists described as huge park-like vistas where forage plants like blueberry could grow, provide food, and attract game animals. There are accounts of early colonists in Massachusetts complaining about the lack of timber due to extensive burnings by Native Americans some twenty miles deep from the coastline.
The way our landscape appears now is dramatically different from what it once was. Over the course of the last two hundred years we have seen a near reversal of the land’s presentation. In the early 19th century New England was denuded of forests by agriculture to the extent that 80% of the land was cleared, leaving about 20% under tree cover. Imagine that? Today it is the opposite with about 20% cleared for farming and 80% under canopy.
So you see Nature often appears to us in illusory ways and our perceptions of Nature are often illusions. What’s more is that we thicken the illusions with our own constructions, our own desires, our egos and our addictions. Science both expands our understanding of the great complexity of Nature while at the same time providing applications that further and further alienate us from it. The most obvious and prescient examples are the combustion engine and digital interfacing and AI technology. Motivated by profit and a very tricky concept known as “progress” we squander the clarity that research science provides us with pollution, isolation and extinction. There’s no better example of natural alienation than in my own field of agriculture. An occupation that should be tasked with stewarding the land and sea while nourishing us and making us healthy is responsible for a plague of problems from climate change and soil erosion, to an explosion of auto-immune diseases, to the enslavement of field workers and livestock animals. It is a very unharmonious system.
But thankfully it is still possible to recognize when Nature and we are together or at odds, when we are discordant or in harmony. It’s in our bodies. We know how good it feels to have our feet in the sand. We know how healing it is to have our feet in the salt water. We know how right it is to be with trees and flowers and to walk in quiet places free from the distortions of Natures designs, distortions that we have wrought all over our landscape. We know what our minds and bodies prefer even when our minds and bodies are hijacked to crave something else.
We know the feeling of disgust we have when we give in to the attention-poachers. How empty we feel after long hours attached to screens, how isolated we feel. We know how we feel when we’re cheated by the bobble-peddlers who are isolating us, antagonizing us, and polarizing us. Too much time in the car, too much time on the concrete, too much time divorced from the moment, too much time within our own reconstructions of Nature. But what do we find? Time and time again we see that the man made is a poor substitute for the cosmically constructed, the things wrought through Nature’s mechanisms and spirit. The synthetic is no match for the photosynthetic. Time and time again we see Nature validated, that nothing is a good as the real thing.
As J.R.R Tolkien said in his letter to his son Christopher, our devices [will] fail [in our] desire and instead turn to new and horrible evil. We know the evil the bobble-makers have wrought. The bobbles are tantalizing, attractive, powerful, and lethal. So in moments of clarity and disgust we turn again to Nature.
The natural world has its beasts, it’s illnesses, it’s catastrophes but within these things it is full of lessons. At the end of the day, despite Nature’s ruthlessness, it is the very thing we come back to in order to seek quiet and consolation, to understand ourselves and our place in the world. It is our only template for what is beautiful and what is ugly. It is our only template for what is right and what is wrong. It is the thing that reminds us that we are part of a whole, a gestalt, a mosaic of the living and the dead.
As I said all is Nature. In the broadest sense all is natural. Look to the motivations of the system to know if the thing you see in front of you is inclined to your wellness, your wholeness, your path. Or is it inclined to it’s own whims, it’s own desires, it’s own benefit. This place, Bell Street Chapel, holds us in the palm of its hand every week and it feels right. It is providing a service to us all and we come to it to provide services to each other. It provides benefits to us and inspires us in similar and different ways as a forest might or a meadow might or an open desert might do. It is a place of Nature.
Remember this: salvation is a collective experience and it can only be brought about by serving and preserving our most fundamental links to each other, the earth, the sky, and the universe beyond… by placing ourselves within it’s cycles. Nature is at the same time our salvation and our redemption. When we stand up for it we stand up for ourselves and when we fight for it we fight for ourselves and our children and the descendants of bees and wasps, beavers and fox, oaks and cardinals.
When you experience it you experience yourself. Thank you and may it be so.