EcoChat: Spirit - Nature - Change  

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• Archived Blog Post

  Date / Time: 10/31/2009 1:52 AM UTC

  Attending & Tending to the Spirit:
  

  E.E. Cummings wrote:
  
  

  i thank You God for most this amazing
  day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
  and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
  which is natural which is infinite which is yes
  
  (i who have died am alive again today,
  and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
  day of life and love and wings: and of the gay
  great happening illimitably earth)
  
  how should tasting touching hearing seeing
  breathing any-lifted from the no
  of all nothing-human merely being
  doubt unimaginably You?
  
  (now the ears of my ears awake and
  now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
  
  

  I love this poem in that it is all about how our senses come alive when in the full presence of what we consider to be "Nature" and through this aliveness we encounter the Divine.  Our senses become the pathway for the Divine to make Its presence known in a complete way. In this fashion we are reminded that as we "attend" to Nature, that is we engage all our senses (not simply our eyes and ears), but the fullness of our organismic being and through this attention we come to find the Divine--and through this we become wholly open and wholly awake.  It makes perfect "sense" that we would have this encounter within the "all nothing-human" Nature, as this is our birthplace--where the Divine set our story in motion. 
  
  Whether we consider our birth as a species in the "all nothing-human" world "divine" or we consider it a miraculous outcome of evolution or some combination of the two, we can appreciate the importance to our overall health and well-being when we are immersed in Nature. Like all species on Earth, when we are in our natural habitat and its healthy we thrive. And part of this thriving comes from the sheer complexity of life in the wild--the sounds, the colors, the smells, the textures, the foods, the temperatures, the intuitive awareness. In our modern world, we are unnundated with an over-abundance of visual and auditory information; while the balance of touch (objects are often smooth plastics and types of cloths, but there is typically a sheer lack of intra and interspecies contact) and the diversity of tastes are narrowed and often artificial. And finally our sense of smell is often overwhelmed for harsh perfumes, exhausts, and chemicals.  In short, our modern life is largely artificial, non-diverse, and overwheling. When we add to our sensory overload, we must consider the sheer level of stress in our day-to-day lives. Stress that causes very real problems for our health. In fact, our day-to-day stess response functions similar to those who have been traumatized--a deep area of our brain that makes emotion-based and quick decisions while encoding (creating a memory) all types of memories to help keep us in high-anxiety in the hopes we'll get the heck out of these situations in the future. And in our culture, we often can't escape (as we get further and further trapped, we often develop "learned helplessness"--a sense of hopelessness in our capacity to change our situation).  Yet, when we step outside of these environments and reenter the world of our birthplace we "awaken", as ee cummings noted. We become "fully" alive; or perhaps more accurate is fully human. We gain a sense of empowerment and completeness--we are restored.  And this sensation of being restored is something researchers have found when examining the experiences of humans in "nature".  
  
  First proposed by psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan in the 1980s, they found that when individuals were asked to identify places that allowed them to feel a sense of relaxation, natural locations were continuously noted. Subsequent researchers developed this theory and found that individuals showed more rapid improvements in surgical outcomes when their hospital rooms overlooked natural areas; they found individuals who were imprisoned reported fewer health complaints and stressers when their cells had windows overlooking natural landscapes; so beneficial is the relationship betwee ourselves and Nature that many projects like the "Bee Kind Garden" have appeared over the last ten years to help promote child health and well-being within a natural environment.  What we find in all of these studies is a direct physiological impact of a contact with Nature.  I would extend this to include tactile relationships to Nautre. We know from health research that when we pet dogs or cats (particularly dogs) our blood pressure and our heart rate drop--this is particularly important for individuals who either have high blood pressure or work within high-stress environments.  In all, we find that stepping outside our mono-species, manufactured world we begin to encounter the possibility of what it means to feel good--to feel "alive again" as cummings would say.
  
  Peace and blessings,
  Dr. Kate!
  
   
   

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  • spirituality
  • psychology
  • personal development
  • nature
  • senses
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