Nature's Wisdom Winter 2006 Vol. 5 Issue 1
Wishing You a Joyously Natural New Year!
Sarah Edwards, Editor
“There is the vast, savage, howling mother of ours,
nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such
affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we
are so early weaned/ From her breast to society, to
the culture which is exclusively An interaction of man
on man. — Henry David ThoreauIt has yet to snow here in our Pine Mountain forest. But winter is definitely here. It was 27 degrees this morning and frost is on the meadow. Every leaf has left our willowy Poplars; their golden beauty lies withered and dry on the forest floor. The Red Wing black birds now sing their Winter songs perched in the delicate lacy branches of the once lush Poplars.
I skipped the Fall issue to complete my dissertation in applied ecopsychology, the study of the relationship between the natural world and our mental and physical health. Gratefully I did complete it and received approval on Christmas Eve! In this issue I would like to share a few of the insights I gained from studying our relationship to nature throughout history, especially as it relates to how we can live more naturally and meaningfully.
In This Issue: Click on the green squares to go directly to items of your choice .
The Historical Quest for Our True Selves
The Historical Quest for Our True Selves
We’ve all heard the saying “Get real!” Usually it means someone is suggesting it’s time to set aside whatever dreams we’d love to follow and settle for something more practical. But if you think about it, when we are most likely to actually “get real” is when we’re faced with a life-shaking crisis. At such times suddenly we become real clear about what’s most important to us.That was certainly the case the first time I “got real.” As I’ve written before, a
life-threatening illness woke me up to the fact that my lifestyle was killing me. I was working too hard, not doing what I really wanted to do and living my life for the goals of others. That’s when I decided to leave salaried employment and pursue my own talents and passions as a writer and career counselor.
Years later another life-threatening crisis forced me to get real again, this time about the toll our fast-paced, congested urban culture was taking on my well-being. That wake up call drew me to nature and the mountain community here where I live.
Completing my dissertation involved studying the history of work in our culture and how it often disconnects us from ourselves and from the natural world that is our home. I was astonished to discover how long and hard humankind has been questing to “get real.” Throughout history many of our greatest thinkers sought to understand how we’ve become so disconnected from who we truly are and how we might go about living more naturally in harmony with ourselves and the natural world within and around us.
I explored the lives of about 60 such thinkers from Greek philosophers like Heraclitus to religious leaders like St. Francis Assisi and Spinoza and philosophers like Rousseau, Emerson and Heidegger, writers like Goethe and Thoreau, and scientists like Prigogine, Valera and Mantura, to name just a few. Swiss-French philosopher, writer, and political theorist, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a notable example.
“Never exceed your rights, and
they will soon become unlimited.” — RousseauRousseau lived from 1712 to 1778, yet he struggled greatly, not just intellectually, but personally, with the same issues of finding a way to live authentically that we face today. He concluded that human beings were essentially good at heart before the advent of civilization when we lived in nature like all other creatures. He referred to us in this state as the noble savage. The problems of identity and how to be our true selves, he believed, accompanied the rise of civilization, which he saw as artificial and corrupt. Efforts to further society, he observed, crushed individual freedom and resulted in continuing unhappiness. He viewed material progress as undermining the possibility of sincere relationships, engendering jealousy, fear, and suspicion.
The thought that we might have a “true self” was a new concept at that time, as was his speculation, now evidenced by anthropology, that agriculture and metallurgy led to unequal hierarchies of status and class. His Discourse on Inequality (1985/1757) is an anthropological thought experiment that attempts to discover what we have lost due to civilization and what the natural human self might be like had we not been shaped by society.
This is a question that puzzled me often during my past three years of study. Who would I be today if I had followed where my heart would lead when I was young, instead of bowing to the rigid and limiting expectations our culture placed on women at the time? It’s hard to imagine what talents, interests, friends and other pursuits I might have discovered.
In the Discourse, Rousseau concludes that we need to live in accord with our feelings and live “within ourselves,” instead of living “outside ourselves” in accord with the opinions of others. This was a significant divergence from modern empiricism, which then like is so often true today as well, assumed that living outside oneself was not only unavoidable, but good for us.
In The Social Contract, Rousseau (1968/1763) coined the term “the tyranny of the majority,” expressing both profound doubts about individualism and his personal yearning for a way to belong to a larger whole. Since a return to our natural state is admittedly not possible, Rousseau was concerned with how to reconcile who we truly and essentially are with how we can live together as a people. How we can be free and yet live in society is the fundamental philosophical problem he addressed in The Social Contract.
The predominant thinking on social contract at the time was that of John Locke, (1632-1704) whose views in Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (2003/1689) played a major role in the formulation of both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Locke claimed the social contract should be an agreement of rules among independent equals for their mutual benefit. But Rousseau took this concept a step further. He opened the Social Contract with his now famous line "Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains," and concluded that the agreement to come together and form a people, "the real foundation of society," is more than merely an aggregation of individual interests and wills. Instead, individuals must be able to concur with the will of the whole. In other words, the contract should be reciprocal as it is in nature and as in “consent of the governed,” individually as well as collectively.
The Challenge to Be Ourselves in a
Hyper-Real WorldBut how could we create a culture that respects
and makes room for us each to follow our individual
paths? Of course, I believe that living and working
more in the model of the 18th century merchants, professions and craftspeople would be a good vehicle for us to find out. At that time most people were self-employment, working from home with family round them in small local communities. They worked their own hours, doing their calling and supporting each other in doing theirs.
Ultimately that’s what Rousseau chose to do. Speaking specifically about work in Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau (1980/1782) wrote, “Work is always joyless and exasperating unless one has chosen it for oneself.” For him the “true path to happiness and well-being lay in finding the way back to natural existence.”Instead of just writing about his philosophy, he chose to live it too, shocking the French philosophes by forsaking his quest for fame to lead a “natural life,” living as himself, enjoying le sentiments de l’existence, the feeing of existence one has when being truly oneself, completely at home in the moment in what he called the “tranquility of spirit.” He chose to earn his way working from home away from the city as a simple copyist of musical scores, preferring a life in which he could create his own days, doing his tasks when and how he liked.
Yet, despite the century’s-old yearning of such great minds as Rousseau to find how we can live authentically and at peace as ourselves in the world, our culture seems to keep drawing us further and further away from the very things we seek. As Dr. Michael Cohen, author of Reconnecting with Nature points out, we spend nearly 95% of our time in a manmade world, a world sociologist and author of The Sacred Canopy Peter Berger describes as artifice, a materially and socially artificial world that we’ve come to think of as both real and natural.
French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1990/1983) goes a step further, asserting that having experienced only prepared realities, or what he calls the hyper-real, where via electronic devices everything is bigger, faster and better than life, we have lost the capacity to comprehend the “real” world.
We look, for example, to the clock, not our internal sense of desire, for what we want to do. The clock tells us when it’s time to eat, sleep, play and work. Experts direct us in how to improve ourselves, select the “best” job, raise our children, and invest our money. Others tell us what we should and shouldn’t eat, how to dress for success, and how to do just about anything else we might be inclined to do. In the process we’ve grown doubtful and distrusting of our own natural wisdom and rely less and less on its guidance.
Increasingly we live not life, but an electronically mediated simulation composed of reproduced information and entertainment that we can be connected to any time and any place, virtually never needing to experience anything original. How challenging it is, though, to live as a human being in this bigger than life hyper-reality. How can we ever live up to the expectations of perfection conveyed by a produced world in which everything is styled and shaped and molded into ideal “hyper-moments?”Yet, there is good news as we begin this New Year!
Every day more of us are, like Rousseau, growing determined to find a way back to a real life that we can touch and feel and breath and be truly refreshed and renewed by on a daily basis. Ironically sometimes it is even our experiences in the mediated world that leads us back to the real. Even there, we’re beginning to notice that something is missing in our lives. We’re becoming aware, to quote a line from the song Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce, “There never seems to be enough time to do the things we want to do once we find them.” And it isn’t setting well with us anymore.
After all every other creature aside from us, if unimpeded by us, knows how to live at peace with themselves in their world. So why, we might ask, can’t we too? In nature, attraction is automatically mutual. All things naturally move toward the place where they are appreciated and supported, because that is where we each can thrive.
In our culture though it can be challenging to find that place of peace, that place of joy where we are welcomed, supported, and appreciated as who we are. Often it feels more like charting one’s way across a raging river. We won’t win if we fight it, but we can’t just give up and get swept away either without losing touch with who we are. Nor can we wait for someone to create a culture in which we can be ourselves.
Instead, like Rousseau, we must each find our own answers and feel our way to our personal path. Then we’ll have a chance to discover what kind of culture we might create together.Finding Our Own Answers
Nature, Courage & Trust
In exploring throughout history the lives of so many who found their own answers, I noticed they shared several qualities. First, from Moses, Jesus and St. Assisi to Rousseau, Thoreau and Heidegger, they each in their own way turned to nature in their efforts to find their path. After reviewing 421 studies, books and articles on the effects of nature on our ability to create more meaningful work and life styles, I found ample evidence that spending time in nature is an ideal, unmediated milieu in which to fulfill the basic psychological needs we require to define ourselves and make self-determined life choices. Specifically these needs are for a sense of personal competence, autonomy, belonging, and security.
Having a strong sense of personal competence, autonomy, belonging and security provides us with the wherewithal to achieve two other consistent themes I found among those who throughout history devoted their personal and professional lives to discovering how to live authentically at peace with themselves in the world: they had great courage and a deep trust.
To stand against the forces of cultural expectations that separate us from who we are and what is most important to us demands courage to venture confidently into the unknown, with all it’s uncertainty and mystery. It also requires an unwavering trust in whatever power one believes underlies the forces of the universe. I noticed that while the philosophical and religious beliefs of our questing forbearers varied, these two qualities did not. They had both the courage to listen to the beat of their own music and the trust to dance boldly to it.
These traits may seem daunting for many of us. We may think they are for the exceptional or the lucky among us. But actually nature would suggest that we are endowed with these traits. We’ve just become estranged from them as we’ve turned to others’ expectations and left the natural world that connects us to them for weekend outings or summer vacations.
But rather than talk about how we are naturally endowed with the ability to simply be who we, I'd rather introduce someone whose life illustrates both that we can do it and what it’s really like to actually do it in the spotlight of today’s hyper-real world. I think most of us can relate to his journey, even if not to where he has arrived at this point in its course.
Their Way Profile
Bo Bice - The Real Thing*“It’s my life, my time to find the answers. Don’t always know
what kind of road’s in front of me, but I’ll go slow, wanna
remember every moment that passes by because this ride
is everything. It’s my life.”It might seem strange to select someone like Bo Bice, who we know primarily through his appearance on the reality television show American Idol, as an example of someone who is the real thing. But in many ways the recent popularity of reality shows and documentaries is actually one of many indications of how just much we yearn to escape from hyper-reality and reconnect with a real world.
I find his story illustrates a very positive trend – that television, the Internet and other forms of electronic media are already becoming an important catalyst, sparking our desire to “get real.” After all, 90% of our clients here at the Institute find us through our website; I completed my entire PhD online; and our newsletter is only disseminated via e-mail; nonetheless each offers a doorway for reconnecting with ourselves through the joy of nature.
Most particularly I believe the enormous popularity this dedicated songwriter, singer and musician has enjoyed over his past year, including being voted Most Popular Reality Star of 2005, is directly related to just how real he has managed to remain in the hyper-real world of entertainment.
Bice says he can’t remember life without music. It has been
his passion from early childhood. By the time he auditioned for
American Idol he already had his own band, had written and recorded many original songs and mastered a number of musical instruments including piano, guitar, bass, and sax. He’d been working for ten years to hone his craft as a musician. But, like for so many of us, he had to endure a long chain of “day jobs” to support his quest to follow this path he loved.At 28, his day job was managing a guitar store and he was older than any previous American Idol participants. Also he was an Alabama Southern rocker, not a pop personality so characteristic of that show. So, the odds were definitely against him even making it onto the show, let alone almost winning it.
But he did and he did it his way, the way that was natural to
him, refusing to change who he was to fit media expectations.
Reportedly, he wouldn’t cut his long hair, or even allow the stylists
and image-makers to change it in any of the creative ways they
urged. Nor would he change how he dressed. He wore his own
eclectic collection of sixties-ish clothes, many of which had been
hand sewn by his grandmother. On occasion he even wore a pair
of $6 sunglasses on stage to cut down the intense glare of the
stage lights. For one of his performances in the big finale between
him another contender, he wore a simple white shirt and thrilled
the audience singing Long, Long Road.
But being one’s self isn’t about non-conformity. That’s not what enables us to be who we truly are. It might look like non-conformity, or rebellion, but it’s really about self-expression. It’s about not holding back or not giving in, but giving life everything one has to give without reservation. And anyone watching Bo Bice perform can see he excels at that. The raw emotion that vibrates through his performances is catalytic, awakening, inspiring, and energizing for his audiences, reminding us how acutely we too yearn to express the vibrant, pulsating, passionate life that lives buried within each of us.
Equally noteworthy is that Bice has insisted life not be
exclusively about work. In the year since he auditioned for
American Idol, he has married his long-time girlfriend and
they have a new baby. In order to assure his personal life
doesn’t get lost in the glitz, unlike previous “Idols” he has
refused to move to Hollywood or New York, choosing
instead to buy a house on six acres of land outside
Nashville where he and his wife can be close to their families.
But as good as this all sounds it hasn’t been any easier a journey for him than it is for most of us, maybe harder. He has gotten ill twice over the past year, one time dangerously, and he has most likely worked at times when he wasn’t fully well.
"Every good day and every bad day has led me to this day.”
As one listens to the lyrics of his recently released album, The Real Thing, one can hear ample references to the determined struggle required to find that line Rousseau spoke of so eloquently between wanting to find a home within our culture and yet stay true to our individual inner nature as a human being simply who we are.
In the title song he sings, “Tell me not to change and always be the same, tell me that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing.” In It’s My Life, he sings, “In times I really miss my family, I wonder what they're doing right now. I know they're thinking of me. I can’t imagine where I’m going. But I know where it is I come from, and it makes me feel complete.”
Not long ago a client asked me about her quest to simplify
her life and live more in accord with her inner calling, “Is it
supposed to be this hard? How do I know if I should give up?”
I thought of Bice at that moment. I thought of the pure joy one
can see permeating his entire being when he sings and I told her,
“When the road is so unpleasant that you no longer find joy in
the destination, it’s probably time to look for a new path.”
“I know I can’t change the music industry,” Bice told CMT’s In
the Moment, “but I have to be sure it doesn’t change me. …
At the end of the day you’ve got to admit you’re not always
right, yet you also have to stick true to the things you
believe in.”
For me his life speaks of how important it is for us to keep making the effort to find our own answers, just as our forbearers have done. To proceed with courage and trust, even if we don't know exactly where our quest might lead and even if the road to get there is different, harder, and longer than we hoped. It also shows that we have avenues for imagining possibilities that weren’t available to those who have gone before us. People we would never have met, places we would never had seen, choices we would never have known about.
But just imagine the new culture we could create if we remain determined to find that place where we can be at home in the world as ourselves. If we each resolved to pursue our personal quest for the real thing in a spirit of love and respect for life, truly putting what is most meaningful and fulfilling to us first each day, what then might our daily life like? Perhaps that is something we can now only vaguely imagine. But we can find out.
Maybe it would be more like this – take a look. (Please be patient. This page may take a moment to load. It is not our site. Music begins before the pictures and text.)What do you think?
*Note: Ironically, or perhaps apropos for our hyper-real world, unlike all other Their Way Profiles in our newsletters, this profile is based not on an actual conversation with Bo Bice, but upon news interviews and video clips I’ve read and seen, as well as from watching his performances on television and listening to his albums.
Recently I attended a concert where I met him briefly and saw him perform live and in person. (Yet another example of how mediated experiences can draw us back to new real life experiences.) I found him to be just as the media shows him only more so – a dynamic, gifted, talented, sincere, caring, and respectful human, being who he is - the real thing.To experience Bo Bice online, click on the green squares:
This Month’s Nature Activity:
Your Path AwaitsGo to an attractive place in nature. Notice the
many sensory experiences it offers. Each of these is
a possible path for you to explore. It might be the
sunlight sparkling on the leaves of a nearby tree.
It might be the lyrical music of a song bird. A cloud
drifting overhead. Moss making its home on a shaded rock. Or the gently rustling of grasses along the walk.Let your senses travel briefly over this environment around you and wait for one aspect of this natural world to bring you a special spark of joy. Then let our attention rest there. Ask for consent to move toward or relate further. If you continue to be attracted, or grow more attracted, the attraction is mutual, so go ahead and explore it to your hearts desire. If as you request consent your attraction wanes, continue allowing your attention to travel over the environment until you find a mutual attraction.
When you have completed this experience, take a moment to reflect on:
- What meaning or relation does this experience in nature have for your life?
- Complete the following three statements:
My experience in Nature shows me I am a person who enjoys …
My experience in Nature shows me I am a person who enjoys …
My experience in Nature shows me I am a person who enjoys …· How would you feel if you had the ability to sense and pursue such attractions taken away from you?
· Share with at least one other person how this experience in Nature has enhanced your life.
· How might you use this same process to guide you in finding your life path?
Introducing the Post-
Corporate
Career Institute
l Now that I’ve completed my PhD everyone’s been
asking me “What’s next?” The answer is that I will be
continuing to write and consult with my clients about
the growing desire to find more naturally fulfilling, and rewarding ways to live and work.
Reconnecting with the real world within and the natural around us is exactly what our clients come to us in search of. They want to escape the pressures and demands of their 24/7, consumer-driven, corporate lives. They want to be able to focus on the things that are truly important to them like friends, family, spirituality, and community. They want to have the freedom to support themselves by doing work that reflects their talents and passions and yet provides them with a good without having to change who they are in their hearts and souls.“We need to find ways to support one another in making
our work sustainable, so we don’t lose our innate or accumulated talents
and wisdom to cynicism and despair, but instead can support ourselves by
bringing them to a world greatly in need of our abilities.”Soon Paul and I will also be launching the Post Corporate Career Institute through which we will train and license other professionals in using a nature-guided approach to help their clients in this quest. Watch for upcoming announcements in our Spring newsletter.
This Month's Nature Artist:
Mel Weinstein
The photographs in this issue are winter scenes
from Pine Mountain where we live. They are by
professional photographer and friend Mel Weinstein.
Mel moved to Pine Mountain from Santa Monica, CA,
because he found it so quiet and beautiful here. “I
was living on a busy, noisy street that was driving me crazy,” says Weinstein, who has been doing professional photography for 30 years. He began taking nature photos while traveling around the US. He “loves capturing the beauty and awe of nature.” His photographs are yet another example of how media can open a doorway to natural experiences we might never otherwise be motivated to explore.
I hope his photos attract you to go into natural areas in and around your own community and enjoy their wonder, or come visit Pine Mountain. It is as beautiful as the pictures suggest, and more so, because every moment nature’s living canvas changes into yet another awesome experience.We always love to hear from you about your experiences in nature and your thoughts about the ideas and activities in our newsletter. E-Mail us.
_______________________
Closing Thoughts
Since I began writing this newsletter last week, our first snow has fallen, melted away and fallen again. Today we are freckled with snow and shrouded in a mist of fog that makes all things more brilliant and alive as the sun filters through its veil. The Red Wing Black Birds are circling the pond in the meadow below our north mountain in kaleidoscopic patterns of flight and, yes, winter is here in all its wonder.Nature’s Blessings in this New Year,
Sarah
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