shizen

Japanese for nature — but simple translation sells it short. Shizen doesn’t mean the outdoors or the natural world as opposed to the human world. It’s closer to self-so-ness — things as they are of themselves, the spontaneous unfolding of what is. The word draws no line between human and nonhuman. It names the way everything naturally is when not forced to be something other. The modern sense of shizen as a category — nature as a domain separate from civilization — comes from the nineteenth century, when it was created by Japanese translators who needed a word for the Western concept. The original meaning is not a place you go, but a quality you already possess.