It's raining hard outside.  The same weather pattern that right now is delaying the Cincinnati-Boston College Birmingham Bowl football game is hitting us, snarling traffic and causing the National Weather Service to issue flash flood advisories (no worries here - I live high up on a hill well beyond any flood event short of the apocalyptic).

The day was mostly spent indoors doing indoorsy things, except for a short drive around the neighborhood running a few chores in the near-gridlock traffic.

Several years ago, a group of parents for some reason bought their school-aged children to the Zen Center for new-comers instruction and general orientation.

The students were precocious and  articulate, as erudite, well-educated children of middle-class Zen practioners tend to be.  They were well-versed in liberal-progressive dogma and proud to show off their politically correct world view.

At some point, the discussion came up of man's role in the natural world.  The children could not conceive of any way that man, greedy, bellicose, and wasteful as he is, could fit in to nature.  "Man doesn't deserve nature," one child told us.  "Nature is better than man deserves."

The children knew well what their parents would have expected them to say.   

But Zen training teaches us to always beware of dualities and to see all things as an intimately interconnected whole.  "Man" is not separate from nature.  "Man" is another animal, made of the same proteins and biomass as the other animals.  There is no "natural world" separate from a "man-made world" or "urban world."  The densest, most heavily developed part of Manhattan Island isn't separate from nature, it's a biome largely created by and populated by one species, Homo sapiens.  

Termites build large, mostly subterranean nests with climate control and complex passageways to suit their needs that couldn't be more different than the environment outside of the nest.  Trees provide shade and habitat for other species and whole ecosytems arise to support and maintain a forest.  Man paves roads and erects tall buildings to suit their needs, but from te Zen perspective to call one habitat "nature" and the other not is a deluded and dualistic way of looking at the world.

To take it a step further, it is exactly this deluded and dualisitc way of looking at the world that causes so much damage to the ecosystem, that wastes resources, and that hordes commodities.  As long as man thinks that nature is something outside and separate from himself, he'll never be in harmony with the rest of it.

Certain indigenous cultures demonstrate that man can and does in fact live in harmony with nature.  But even when we're not in harmony, we bipedal apes are never not a part of nature as a whole.

The kids that day weren't buying any of this.  This flew in the face of the very basis of their ecological world view and seemed to deny the guilt they believed should be felt about the state of the ecosystem.  It denied the moral supremacy of their so-called "enlightened" view of  man's inherent separation from nature.

In the end, the children taught the teachers.  Not about separation of man and nature, but they reminded us that the mental models we construct, our schema, what the Buddha called samskara, are formed early and are difficult to let go of once formed.