Health first grows wild, like the brilliance of spring. Somehow we spring from the perfection of a seed. Then, when health vanishes, everything else personal also disappears. Surely the creatures of the wilderness instinctively know this. They must defend their health with their lives—for it is their life.

Whether or not we’re sufficiently aware of it, it’s the same for those of us in the tame or “civilized” world. What’s different is one particular belief about health.

In the wilderness, health is a gift given once. It’s a single blossom bound to fade. The body’s natural defenses may allow recovery from minor illnesses and injuries. The body is a remarkable healer. Still, the wild offers no doctors, no miracle cures, no casts and surgeries and high-tech medical magic. If you break something, it’s broken. If you contract something, you have it until it goes away itself or kills you.

The vast knowledge of healing we have been so clever to discover has given us great gifts of ease and peace of mind—and I, for one, would have been dead from cancer as a young man, without them. I, like endless others, have gratitude for modern medicine’s charms. But I’m also aware that these same charms have, while restoring our health, come to erode our appreciation of it. Instead of viewing our health as a unique, cherished, irreplaceable gift, we have developed the view that health is more like a mechanical device which can be repaired an almost unlimited amount of times, no matter its condition.

The more miraculous and astute that medical knowledge becomes, the higher our expectations of repair rise, and the lower our appreciation of health sinks. The streets are now teeming with people who have abdicated their responsibility to take care of their own health; who expect the medical system not only to be able to repair them, but to do so with little or no effort on their part—no matter what their lifestyle has contributed to injury or illness. That loss of a sense of personal responsibility, and of the vital fragility of health, is a great and unnecessary casualty of medical advances. Fortunately, nature is still here to remind us that the truth hasn’t changed: health is a gift given once. Health is a wild miracle, beside which our own creations pale.

Individually, health is far more than a mere absence of illness; it’s a holistic way of being affecting body, mind and spirit. And even holistic individual health, if pursued without regard to its effects on systemic health, can be deeply unhealthy overall. Health is not merely personal, separate from the health of others and the soil. Just as there is only one education, there is only one health: that of the planet itself.

Our own fierce instincts for survival are a part of that health; our individual lives have a place in that balance. Threats to each of us have lessened, though, and our lifespans lengthened. Our individual health and survival chances have become so high that our collective survival overwhelms. The planet does not need us all, for its health.

Some of us must regain the acceptance of the weak and injured wild animal, who knows it must go back to the earth. Who is so gracious in not complaining of its painful part in that wild grace, when grace means passing on. There is wisdom in that weakness. Health is a gift; but so can death be, in the context of the greater continuance. It can be a gift from the individual to the earth that needs to reclaim the life; that needs one less life of that certain kind right now, to be restored to balance. It can be the hardest gift to accept the need to give, and the greatest.

Yes, health is a gift given once. It’s a temporary gift, too, on a personal level. Health must always be given back, in the end. The individual always leaves it available for another, whose turn it is next to serve the balance by living. No individual owns health any more than they own spirit or the kiss of another soul. Health is entrusted to us to nurture for awhile, a brief while, before we go. Health is for us to fall humbly before, in reverence to it—each of us, its beautiful servants.