Like Nietzsche's own writings on education, most of mine were relatively youthful ones. Both were inspired by a critical animus against prevailing trends in education: in Nietzsche's case, the production either of 'useless', dry-as-dust scholars or people 'useful' for the needs of an expanding industrial economy; in my case, a similar subjection of education to economic imperatives, but also to ideological obsessions, notably with promoting 'equality'.
The writing I have in mind and sometimes indulge in myself is concerned, not with plants, mountains or birds as items of scientific description, but with experiences of nature that impinge upon our moods and emotions, enrich our imagination and reveries, and shape our sense of how we stand in relation to the environing world. In a broad sense of the term, this kind of writing is an exercise in phenomenology, an attempt to render the significance that birds, plants or whatever have for us.
For me, the existentialists are important critics of 'absolutist' claims, and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are, at least in their later writings, also exponents of a doctrine of mystery: Being or the 'well-spring' of everything is, for Heidegger, ineffable, just as what Merleau-Ponty called 'Flesh' is for him.
