What do we consider Nature to be, and what is our relationship with her?

For my money, this is one of the BIG Questions, if only because there are several quite different contending takes on or aspects of, which is to say: approaches that lead in different directions. None is ipso facto The Truth or the whole answer. Each may give some degree of comfort, or may repel the pilgrim seeking understanding. 

First of all: are we to think of Nature as (a) a human creation, and so ours to do with as we will, or as we can imagine; or (b) something greater than ourselves, that we are a subpart of and subject to. 

In the 'human creation' version I see two candidates: 

(1) Nature as a Being of puissance, Gaia, in effect one of the Endless with which human lives are entangled (as Neil Gaiman describes them in Sandman: Death, Dream, Desire, Despair, Delerium/Delight, Destruction and Destiny, all there before human consciousness, and remaining after [to turn out the lights]). James Lovelock is the primary architect of this view of Earth/Gaia, conceived as a single self-regulating organism.

(2) Nature as Personification of Life, as Mother, with imputed human characteristics ('life-giving and nurturing') which facilitate our comprehension, and best understood via tales, myths, and vitalist explanations. Not all are nurturing: 'Nature, red in tooth and claw' (as Tennyson put it) emphasizes the competitive aspect of the natural world; Darwin put  'natural selection' at the core of organic evolution, citing a 'struggle for existence' in the natural world. In the religious variants of this view may be found God and the gods, and reverence for Life.

Under the 'greater than' rubric, two more candidates:

(3) Nature as Hyperobject, something too vast and distributed (and disinterested) to confine within the categories and capabilities of our senses and processors; Climate and Atmosphere are such Hyperobjects. Our sensory limitations restrict how much we can know about such entities, just as we see and hear only a limited sector of the electromagnetic spectrum. In this version, Nature simply IS and we are pinioned within it.

(4) Nature as System, as a transducer of Energy (based upon solar radiation, having and maintaining Order, but subject to Entropy): equilibrium, feedback, dynamic complexity, fractal organization, beginnings and endings.

All of these are more or less valid views, so the personal question is which seems most worth working on or with? Is there one that invites or allows some sort of action to accomplish something ameliorative? Or that is susceptible to our worshipful entreaties? Thus, one might opt for (2): the tale-making, and for the creation of human-scale and human-centric explanations and expositions. That would lead one to read the great Nature writers who make some kind of coherent narrative sense: Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, etc. There's lots of sci-fi in this vein, too: Frank Herbert, Ursula Le Guin. The bugaboo that keeps coming up as one explores in this way is HUBRIS as a fundamental human mode of being in relation to other life forms, and strategies to "fix" things such as GeoEngineering are pretty close by.

For version (4), the most accessible writing is in Ecology, which explores the interrelations and interdependencies among biotic community members: the numbers and distribution of plants and animals, the trophic webs which bind them together, the symbiosis and dynamical self-regulating that constitutes equilibrium in a cybernetic sense, and that rests upon cycles and the carbon chemistry that underlies all those interspecies exchanges. Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life would be a good entry point for this version. Humanity is just another transitory instantiation of life, and no Crown of Creation.