shizen

The Japanese word for nature — but the translation sells it short. Shizen doesn't mean "the outdoors" or "the natural world as opposed to the human world." It means something 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 otherwise. The modern sense of shizen as a category — nature as a domain separate from civilization — is a 19th-century import, created when Japanese translators needed a word for the Western concept. The original meaning is deeper and more radical: not a place you go to, but a quality of being you already possess.