Nature's Wisdom Summer, 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 .
Summer Days: Sweet Memories Long-Forgotten
Summer Days
Sweet Memories Long-Forgotten
Summer has brought many gifts to Pine Mountain for me to share with you. Spring pretty much skipped over us, but the lilacs and the forsythia finally bloomed in all their ever-surprising brilliance. I walked on to the porch one rainy morning to find our front yard had become a sea of lavender. I stood in the midst of a Lilac Rain as tiny blossoms cascaded on giant droplets to the forest floor. Oh, my, the fragrance of wet Lilacs amid the pines!!!This morning I was greeted by a morning moon. It hung pale over the southwest mountains, such a contrast to the fiery glowing orb that descended slowly behind those same mountains the evening before.
The baby quails are here now. They can’t be more than 3” long, a rapid river of brown flowing across our yard behind a regal mom and dad. Two new neighbors also visited our yard this morning. Two fawns, still flecked with their spots, looked up at me with cautious curious stares as I stood still so that they might know me before turning away.We’ve lots of rain, too, this summer. Such a rarity for our dry mountains. And not just summer showers. House-shuttering, thunder, and lightening storms, pounding torrents of deliciously wet, ground-soaking, puddle-making, rain that fills the air with the rich, moist vanilla smell of Jeffery pines. How I had forgotten such things! A lilac laden world! Thunder! Lightening! The smell of summer camp in the rain! Hmmm. Memories of a Midwest childhood long forgotten.
I grew up in Kansas City where my childhood summers were hot, hot, hot, and very moist, even in the sun, compared to here where the shade is always cool and so dry, dry, dry. Those long, hot summers drew my best friend and I to Church School early week-day mornings at the nearby Community Christian Church. We didn’t belong to that church, but our church across the street didn’t have a Summer Church School. The large limestone Community Christian Church was always cool inside. Like a long drink of Rocky Mountain spring water. And quiet too. Very quiet and still. A peaceful place.
I remember little of what I learned there, though. I’m afraid I
didn’t pay a lot of attention to the lessons. The giant elms were rustling softly outside large, open leaded windows and the ground squirrels and Jays were chattering and cutting up in those thick dark branches, drawing my attention away from the classroom. There is one thing, though, I do remember from the lessons. Something I have often recalled, but only recently from my studies of ecopsychology come to fully understand.
In that little Church School they used to say, “God is Love.” As a child this meant little to me. It was more confusing than enlightening. “God is Love???” Like a hug? Like a warm arm around your shoulders? A kiss on the cheek? Love is a feeling. Is God a just a feeling? Being only about 8 or 9 years old I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. Still, the idea God as love seemed somehow vaguely wonderful in an unfathomable way.
As I grew older, this idea meant even less to me, because I found that love was so many different things, some good, some not so good, some bringing joy and comfort, others bringing pain and disappointment. So many dreadful things, I came to know, are done in the name of love. So, surely God could not be love. But then, of course, I also learned that throughout history so many dreadful things have been done in the name of God. Still, even while quite young, I knew that those things could be neither love nor God. So I tucked that lesson away in some long-lost crevice of my mind, back with my memories of those hot, moist Kansas City summers and a cool, quiet limestone church surrounded by gently rustling elms trees.
And there it pretty much reminded until my studies of nature. The lessons I learned there brought that phrase God is Love to mind once again, bringing science and religion together in my personal understanding of God, love and life.“One thing is needful.”
Jesus of Nazareth
Natural Attractions We Know as LoveThroughout time many religious leaders from St. Francis Assisi to Ralph Waldo Emerson have turned to nature as a way to be closer to their God. Francis viewed all nature as a mirror of God, calling all creatures his brothers and sisters. Emerson believed that “Everything in Nature … is made of one hidden stuff,” which he experienced as the workings of God.
In ecopsychology I learned about this “hidden stuff“ and that Emerson was most certainly not the only one to notice it. Both religion and science have found, either through prayer or mathematical formulations, the presence of the “hidden stuff” that connects and creates all things. Dr. Michael Cohen refers to it as NIAL, natural intelligent attractions we know as love, that bind us to life through our sensory awareness. These positive inclinations draw us to cleave to and connect with that which is mutually supportive and rewarding. They also draw us away from things that aren't positive and mutually supportive of us and others.
As I look around our mountain forest, I see NIAL everywhere. I see how the moss cleaves softy to the tree trunks. I see how the trees cleave to the earth. How their roots reach deeply into its sustenance and their branches stretch upward to the nourishment of the sun. I see how water particles cleave to each other in the form of clouds that are drawn to drift upon on wind currents that cleave to the movement of yet other currents. I see in this forest how everything is connected to everything else in positive energetic ways, supporting and reinforcing the health and growth of each one and all.
Pioneering systems theorist Ervin Laszlo calls this hidden stuff that binds us a “5th force” of subtle energy. Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme refers to it as "allurements." Efforts in advanced physics to develop a unified theory that explains all forces of nature describe physical reality as composed of multi-dimensional loops or strings of energy, or information. Many shamanic teachers throughout the ages have spoken of sacred “luminous fibers,” or lie lines, that connect all things.
Teilhard de Chardin, a Catholic priest and scholar, considered this force that exists in both the organic and non-organic and binds us in intrinsic unity to be the spirit of the Earth, the workings of God through all that is.
And so it is on this warm summer day looking out on the lake and meadow below, I see science and religion join hands in the surrounding forest, reminding me of those hot summer days in a cool limestone church where I first heard it said that God is Love.
The Contagious Nature of Love
"I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house…. I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging of society may be found in any natural object, even from the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man.”
Henry David ThoreauAs Thoreau discovered on Walden Pond, we easily feel the effects of NIAL in natural outdoor settings. A feeling of peaceful contentment comes over us and we feel as if all is right with the world. Cares fall away. We have a sense of being at one with life, at home. Aldus Huxley considered this “unitive” experience to be at the heart of spirituality and the goal of human existence.
So, of course, it isn’t limited to how we feel in nature. We can feel it in our manmade world, too. Sadly, though, it can be more difficult to distinguish there because we must screen it out from all the unnatural addictions and cravings we tend to mistake for “love.” As in, “I just love to eat more and more of this cake,” “I love this guy so much even though he is abusive and inconsiderate of me,” "I love being in charge of everything."In this sense, if we pay attention, we notice NIAL is tugging at us to head in different way. It’s that little “gut feeling” we get but too often don’t listen to. “Ooh," it says in its wordless way, "I should get out of here!” Or "That's not for me." But we also feel NIAL in the presence of others who are themselves "in love" with life in the moment, connected and “in sync” with who they are and all around them. An interesting characteristic of being in such a state of being is that we radiate “love” and it’s contagious. From such a place, others are drawn to us and we to them.
Beethoven spoke of this as touching the Godhead and believed there was no greater mission in life than disseminating the divine rays of such an experience to others through his music. It is in this way, by giving of ourselves, that our personal experience of NIAL spills out into our lives where it can heal and transform both us and life around us.
Personally I have seen this in the faces of my friends when we are gathered together. I have felt it even from afar. Nearly a year ago, for example, I heard a musical performance that so radiated a spirit of love that I immediately wanted to hear more. This attraction drew me to a web site of others who were equally drawn to the powerful, life-giving quality that emanates from this music. There, on that site, the love for life we experienced in the voice and song of another has spilled through the ethos of cyberspace into our relationships with one another.
Although we live across the US and beyond, we care deeply not only for the performer, his work and his well-being, but equally deeply for one another. Not a day goes by that we don’t support and nurture each other, a small group of people who, but for the contagious power of love, would be total strangers, most likely never having the occasion to meet.Each in our own way we have been sustained and healed through this amazing "love connection." We have laughed, cried, grieved and rejoiced together and in the process grown, blossomed, and prospered, also becoming more loving toward the others in our own daily lives. We are like this summer forest, bringing forth in both rain and sun, dark of night and light of day, the best in life within and around us.
Blessedly when life is such that I become disconnected from NIAL, I can always return to nature and, like Emerson and Thoreau, know I will always find it waiting there for me.
Nature Activity: Nature’s Gift of Community
Nature counselor and educator Carol Biggs has created a deck of 52 educational and spirit-filled cards for weekly use, each one based on one of the senses that enable us to come into communion with life. Here’s a sample of Nature’s Gifts:
“Where else but outdoors can my feeling capacities be met and nourished continuously? Stress gently falls away as I tune into my surroundings: squirrel chitters, magpie whistles a three-note tune, trees dance with gusts of rain-fed wind, clouds darken an already darkened northern sky. Each moment is brand new in this dynamic life-support system,”
“Insight: I am part of a global life community. Feelings of belonging, trust, support and gratitude increase when I spend time in nature. As will all my earth creatures, my natural inheritance includes these life sustaining gifts.”
You can find out more about Carol's deck of Wisdom-filled Insights through Nature-Connected Moments by contacting her at Alaska Nature Connection, PO Box 20271, Juneau, AK 99802, 907 586-2453, aknature@alaska.net
Rant!!!!!!
"I stood up one day and found myself."
Bo Bice, Valley of Angles, The Real ThingIt seems odd to move from these thoughts of love and unity to a rant! Yet I believe our rants arise from deep within the powerful feelings we experience when the culture disconnects from our natural “(w)holy” place, that NIAL place we know in our hearts as who we truly are. Such a state of disconnection is indeed relevant to my rant.
Recently I was watching a movie in which the main character was trying to learn to become a salesperson. He was listening to audiotapes about the power of positive thinking, playing them over and over in every spare minute. “See yourself as you want to be,” the voice on the tape commanded.
How often I have heard that message. Act “as if” you are the person you want to be. Hearing this, feelings of anger rose up in me. I wanted to shout out, "Wouldn’t it be more interesting to discover who we are than to try to imagine who we might become?" How do we honor what we can become if we never allow ourselves the opportunity to be who we are?Why, oh, why are we always trying to imagine or think ourselves into being someone? We are someone! But who? Do we ever get to find out? Not if we’re too busy imaging who we think we want to be and trying to act like that model in our mind. What is wrong with just being who we are? All other creatures seem to do quite well that way.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest feat is that we are powerful beyond measure.” Nelson Mandela
The nights are getting cold now. Summer has come and is preparing to depart. Yet the Butterfly bushes are in full bloom, drawing the Swallowtails and Monarchs to visit in all their splendor. The hummingbirds take their meals there too. They come to the cleave to the nectar of these late summer blooms, as we cleave to their beauty, welcoming them with our eyes. Soon they will flutter away on Summer’s shirt-tails, leaving us to await Fall’s return.
Spring Blessings,
Sarah
