Nature's Wisdom Spring 2006 Vol. 5 Issue 2
by Sarah Anne Edwards
In This Issue:
Read in order bellow or click on the green squares to go directly your choice .
Spring Surprise! How Do You Feel about Surprises?
Spring Surprise!
How Do You Feel about Surprises? Eeek! or Whoopee!As I begin writing this newsletter, it is the first day of Spring, March 21st. Two weeks ago I would have believed Spring was ready to debut. The jonquils were pushing theirleafy fingers up through the forest floor
along our driveway. Buds were forming on the lilac bushes.
The little ground squirrel who has been hibernating in the water pipe insulation on our patio left its nest. A Robin was exploring our front yard. And it was 60 degrees outside! We’ve had a very warm and dry winter. Actually it seemed we’d missed out on winter this year.But then, Surprise! Two weeks ago, winter arrived. It has snowed almost non-stop since then. Sheets of snow billow in gales across the meadow below our house. The world is white and cold and alive with howling winds. We feel their force pressing hard against the windowpanes, hear their moans in the eves, and bundle up in extra sweaters as their breath slips beneath our windowsills.
So much for our dental appointments in the city last week. So much for that committee meeting I was gong to. So much for the going-away party we’d planned to attend Saturday night. It’s been rescheduled three times to no avail. No one is going anywhere. Instead we’re living in a Christmas card!
This is so like Nature - and life - to be on a time schedule all its own. In the urban world I came from, we didn’t take kindly to surprises like this. Once we get out of grade school, that is, and the delight of “snow days” has passed, such surprises are usually considered unwelcome irritants we have to “cope” with and would prefer to avoid whenever possible.
But since moving here to this mountain forest, I’ve come to love Nature’s surprises! I love the incessant reminder that I’m not in charge! That we, as humans, are participants in life, not the all-powerful directors of it. Being so close to nature here for the past seven years has taught me I don’t even want to be so omnipotent. I find life is much more interesting and amazing than our plans for it, which in reality are often somewhat mundane or quite grandiose.
We may think we know the path we want to take, but just like our Spring Surprise, life often jerks us onto a different path. Such shifts remind me of an amusement park ride from my childhood called The Whip. We used to save our allowance money so we could ride The Whip and have the ever-startling feeling of the totally unexpected. How we would squeal with delight as we were jerked first one way, then the other.
What has become of us, that we spend so much time struggling to be the masters of our fate? Why don’t we greet life’s surprises with the delight and wonderment of a child?
Welcoming the Unexpected
How We Become What We ExperienceThere was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And the grass and white and red morning glories, and white and red clover,
And the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the Third-month lambs and the sow’s pink-faint litter,
And the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf …
Walt Whitman, 1997/1900I believe the answer lies in the lines from the
above Walt Whitman poem. We come to reflect he environment around us.
Using magnetic resonance imaging, for example, neuroscientists at UCLA have discovered that we mirror the experiences present in our environment. Our brain registers what we observe as if we were having that experience ourselves, e.g. observing someone else smile registers on our brain as if we ourselves were actually smiling, and in many cases we will smile, spontaneously mimicking physically the emotional experience of another.
Just as practicing the piano or learning to read physically alters areas of the cerebral cortex, intense, repetitive experience can do more than change our minds. It can alter the brain itself. So, we are not only what we eat, but also what we hear, see, and otherwise experience most often.I have often experienced this mirroring effect. When I lived in the city, change and the unexpected bugged me. There were always pressures and demands for me to be in control of things I couldn’t control – to stay on track despite the timing, twists and turns of life. I was impatient, rushed and tense, just like the city around me.
If someone didn’t show up for an appointment on time, I was miffed because my schedule was usually so tight that any glitch rippled like a domino effect through my day, upsetting one event after another, as well as that of all the folks who were “counting on me” to keep to a schedule, who were soon miffed with me too.Simple things like rain, for example, so needed in Southern California, are rarely welcomed. We experience them as an inconvenience, almost an affront to our plans. Life unfolding naturally complicates our life. We can hear this attitude expressed regularly on the evening news as the anchors bemoan “bad” weather forecasts and rejoice in “good” ones.
But here in the forest, we live in the micro climate of a rain shadow. We never really know what to expect. It can snow any month of the year, and has, or it can be sunny and bright for weeks on end. And the people who live hear tend to mirror our mountain climate. They are as quixotic as our weather. You never know if someone is going to show up for an appointment, because they just may not. It’s the rare appointment that isn’t rescheduled several times before being kept. And it’s not always due to the weather. More often it’s just due to life. A sick daughter. A tooth that has to be pulled. A sore back. A grandchild’s championship game.
Life comes along and we accommodate. The unexpected is, while unknown, nonetheless expected and accepted. But accepting this as reality makes life so much easier for me and for the others in my life.
A year ago, for example, I worked hard to get a contract for a book I wanted to write for my dissertation. But – Whip! Whip! – no publisher expressed interest. So much for that plan. I did my dissertation on what I’d been doing, working with people who want to be self-employed. In so doing I created a nature-guided Post-Corporate Career counseling program and certification process.
Then no sooner was my dissertation complete than – Whip! Whip! - along came the book contract I’d wanted. Once again, change of plans. Now I’m writing the book that was to going be my dissertation!All this whip-whipping would have really bugged me before I moved here and started to be more like our forest. Now instead, my first reaction to these changes is “Hmmm, that wasn’t the way it was supposed to go!” But I quickly counter with “Oh, no? How do I know?” It might seem like my timing is off, but who’s to say it’s not all perfect. Or, if not perfect, at least just as interesting and enjoyable as how I had planned it? I can welcome it just as I now welcome the glorious beauty of the sleet and hail and drifting snow that adorns our village on this first day of Spring?
Maybe the day will come that I don’t even question life’s ever-changing course, but just go with the flow.
Trusting Life’s Constancy
Trusting Life's Constancy“One day I'm gonna to wake up
And I know that the sun is gonna shine …
One day I know the clouds,
They're going to part
And I know its rays
They will find me.”
Bo Bice, Sinner in a Sin
Dual Disc Album The Real Thing
Perhaps one reason, we can more easily welcome life’s surprises living here in our forest is because paradoxically beneath nature’s perpetual, unpredictable change also lies a comforting certainty. As I write today, one week later, it is 60 degrees again. The recently frozen forest floor is thawing, moist and pungent with melted snow. The jonquils are once again reaching toward the sunlight that peeks gently through the pines.The Mallards are flying down the meadow this morning as they do in mating season. The Stellar’s jays are building another nest on the beam outside our bedroom window. And once again - the bats are back! They take up residency in the rafters of our front porch every year around this time.
So, Spring is certainly more than a date on the calendar and maybe is has arrived?Nature Activity: Finding Our Way
Identify something you think of as a sign of Spring and go out outdoors to look for it. Is it there? What do you notice? Now forget about looking for anything in particular and just follow your attractions as you explore the natural aspects of the area around you. What do you notice now? How does your experience change when you set out to look for something specific versus when you simply experience what attracts you?
How is this like or different from when you live according to your own expectations of what you think you want versus when you discover what is actually appealing to you in the here and now? Do we overlook many things that might be truly rewarding by looking for things we’ve pre-determined would be desirable?
Getting a Little Help from Nature
Between snowstorms this past week we had a very challenging project we were hired to do in the city. It involved working from 2 AM to 8:30 AM under cold, stressful circumstances. But it was also a very promising and positive opportunity for us. We were provided with a beautiful hotel room where we could try to rest a bit before heading off to the site. Unfortunately the hotel was situated on a major freeway and the sound of the traffic, loud and continuous, enveloped us.
I soon felt fatigued and weary and grew concerned I would be too tired to perform well. I started to feel quite agitated like the frenzied traffic below our room. I decided to travel in my mind to our mountain forest and imagined myself there. Here are the two thoughts that came to mind to sooth my nerves:
I am falling snow, falling to feed the Earth.
Look how eagerly and peacefully I come to lay myself upon you,
to join you, to become you.""I am tiny ground squirrel,
nestled in the arms of deep Winter Sleep."As I repeated these lines and imagined myself so, I drifted into a peaceful, comfortable state until our “wake-up” call came at 1:30. If you are attracted to do so, try imagining yourself as some aspect of nature whenever you are in need of a shift in consciousness. Better yet, if you can, go outdoors and mimic the attractive aspects of nature around you. Bathe yourself in it.
A Morning PrayerIn this house made of dawn,
In this house made of evening twilight,
In this house of dark cloud,
Happily may I walk.
In beauty may I walk.
In beauty I am complete.
In beauty all is complete.
A Navaho PrayerIt is one thing to accept the natural flow of life and quite another to accept the travesties thrust upon us by our disconnection from nature and our natural selves. These I believe we must not accept as “natural.” They are not. By accepting them, we allow them to continue.
So I’ve decided to add a Rant!!!!! Section to the Newsletter and we invite you to send us your own rants of anger about our nature- disconnected world.
I read the LA Times every morning and it’s a rare morning that something I read doesn’t really get my dander up because it is so unnatural and so reflective of what burdens we endure by being so disconnected from who we are as natural beings living in a natural world.My rant of the moment sprang from three articles I read in the La Times over the past two days about what young people are going through to get into a “good” college these days.
One mother described it as “an arms race.” A race that can involve having to identify an outstanding passion at the age of 16, taking AP classes that require and an hour and a half of homework every night, being forewarned by school counselors of one’s shortcomings, getting SAT tutoring that can run $2000 up and/or taking SAT prep classes, and grinding away until 3 AM to study for entrance exams.
Another mother described how her daughter had to sit through six back-to-back hours of AP test-taking without lunch and only one ten-minute break. That was in addition to taking after-school college classes while still in high school to improve her chances of being admitted to a school of her choice. Despite these efforts this young woman received several heart-wrenching rejection letters before getting into a college at the bottom of her list.
A pediatric nephrologist described her daughter as so stressed out and downhearted while awaiting word from the 10 colleges she’d applied to that “she’s unable to focus on routine activities.”
Upon contemplating the hour and half of home work each night per AP class her son will be expected to take upon entering high school, another mother asked, “Is this what [he] wants? Is this what we want for him? … Three years of stressing over mountains of schoolwork for the possible – just possible – prize of a spot at a great university?”My Rant!!!! ---- Thank goodness this mother is asking these questions. This is pathetic! Pathetic that parents and young people believe the college one goes to is worth such extraordinarily costly and unpleasant efforts. Pathetic that in terms of our social norms and economic realities they are justified in such beliefs and pathetic that schools encourage and even require such unnatural, unhealthy behavior!!!!!!
Curiosity and learning are natural, inherited traits in human beings. They are survival tools wired into our physiology to be pleasurable and rewarding. What have we done to turn learning into a painful, stressful, competitive experience? I have to wonder what kind of learning really occurs under such circumstances, and what is it that’s really being learned? Certainly a lot about of cultural expectations.
Thankfully the entrance process wasn’t like this when my son applied for college. But were I to have a child today, I don’t think I could in good conscience subject him or her to such a process. You know the adage if you feed it, it will grow. Well, we’ve been feeding this approach to education and it’s been growing. If we keep on feeding it, it will just get worse!
If this bothers you too, let’s do whatever we can to bring it into people’s awareness. Let’s be willing to learn from nature, be in nature, reconnect with nature. Then knowing what a natural state of being feels like, be willing to step out into the spotlight when something in our manmade world feels wrong and unnatural. Let’s speak out about it. As long as these things are ignored or taken for granted, no one will even question them.
We don’t ever need to make anyone not OK in this process. We can simply communicate how we feel and invite others to also spend more time in nature and then explore how they honestly feel in their hearts.Our New Book: A Request!
We need your help. As I mentioned I am researching a new book with my husband and partner Paul. We believe it could be the most important book we’ve written. It will be addressing what's happening to the middle class in the US and the kind of things people are doing to live more naturally in accord with their personal values and priorities in our changing global economy.
We're just beginning to interview people, so if you are doing, or know anyone who is or has done, any of the following to protect or achieve a better quality of life, let us know:
o Moved to a small town
o Moved to another country
o Has found a way to live rent-free
o Living full-time on the road
o Is living off the land or off the grid
o Doing permaculture in a metro area
o Living legally and comfortably tax-free
o Started a non-profit
o Participating in some kind of communal living
arrangement
o Saving significant amounts of money by
bartering, swapping, or participating in
starting a time bank, coop or community
script system in place of money.
Eco-Bell
Thanks so much for the names of anyone you can suggest. We'll look forward to telling you more about the interesting people we meet and the intriguing choices they are making as this path unfolds.
Spring Blessings,
Sarah
