What is a Nature Intuitive?

In my book Voices of the Earth: The Path of Green Spirituality I talk a lot about being a nature intuitive. I have to admit this phrase makes me a little uncomfortable (isn't that the curse of the author, to read our published words and cringe a little?). I came up with it in the interest of maybe coining a phrase or at least presenting my ideas in a neat little package. But the thing is, I'm afraid making it a neat little package is rather misleading.

A nature intuitive, as I mean it in Voices, is someone who talks to nature and hears an answer. Who listens to his or her keenest level of sensory perception - which is to say the five senses - to tune into the quantum sea in which we and nature exist. But of course we are nature, too. Everything is nature. To say that a tree or a rock is more "nature" than a person or a table is erroneous. We're all vibrations. We're all part of the great being some call Gaia - and also of God/the Creator/the Goddess/the Great Spirit, etc.

Not everyone's intuitive or psychic abilities are the same. They vary in degree and style. Some are mediums, able to clearly communicate with the dead (and their styles can differ from each other). Some can sense the future. Others may have a heightened intuitive sense but not be tuned in (yet?) to the afterlife or the future, for instance. Along these lines, some people will be more interested in, and therefore able to sense, the vibrations of the natural world than people. So maybe we could call them nature intuitives. But really it's all extended sense perception directed at whatever thing you want to sense. Everyone has this ability, or the ability to develop psychic senses.

I do think perhaps being surrounded by "nature" (i.e. trees, water, stones) helps us to slow the mind chatter, a crucial part of tuning in to extended senses. So learning to intuit nature energies might be an easy first step to developing one's abilities to attune to people, which we usually refer to as psychic.

So. Don't get hung up on the nature intuitive phrase (maybe you weren't - I hope not. I was). It's all about attuning, listening, focusing - inward and outward. I think you'll find that this ability will lead you to "nature" no matter what you call it.