Holy Nature - Enature - On The Desert Island -1... May 2026

What makes nature holy? Not beautiful. Not useful. Holy.

Holiness, in the original sense of the word (hagios in Greek, qodesh in Hebrew), means “set apart.” It means something that cannot be commodified, traded, or fully understood. A holy thing is a threshold you cannot step over without changing.

In our daily lives, we experience “eNature”—nature mediated, digitized, categorized. We have apps that identify birds by their songs. We have 4K livestreams of African watering holes. We have Wikipedia pages for every moss and lichen. This is eNature: nature as information. It is useful. It is safe. It is not holy. Holy Nature - Enature - On The Desert Island -1...

Holy Nature begins where the signal ends.

Imagine you are on a desert island. No Wi-Fi. No solar charger. No field guide. The palm trees are not “Arecaceae”—they are just there, swaying in a wind that has no weather report. The tide does not follow a tide chart on your phone; it follows the moon’s actual, indifferent gravity. The fish you catch is not “mackerel, 240 calories, high in omega-3.” It is a silver terror dying in your hands, which you must eat or starve. What makes nature holy

That is holy. Because it is set apart from your frameworks. It confronts you not as a resource, but as a presence.

It is not all hymns and sunsets. There is the other side of Holy Nature—the predator. the island of loneliness

Last night, a reef shark circled my lagoon. I felt the ancient, mammalian terror spike through my spine. In my old life, I would have called a ranger or bought a gun. Here, I had to negotiate. I realized that the shark was not evil. It was hunger with fins. It was part of Enature too.

Holy Nature includes the fang. It includes the rot. It includes the parasitic worm and the bone-dry drought. On this island, I have learned to say "Amen" to the mosquito as well as the sunset. This is the hardest lesson: The sacred is not comfortable.

I am on Desert Island - 1 (I suspect there are many islands within this one—the island of thirst, the island of loneliness, the island of bliss). I have named this first phase "The Unfastening." Every day, another rivet of my civilized personality pops loose.

If you are ever lucky enough to be shipwrecked (and I use that word ironically—for I have never been luckier), you will need a new set of commandments. Here are the first three I have carved into my palm trunk: