Connecting to Nature: Bird Language as One of Our "Universal Grammars"

The great linguist, Noam Chomsky, taught us that humans must possess a ‘universal grammar,’ because children are able to learn the complex nuances of language at such a surprisingly early age.  The only explanation, he argued, was an evolved predisposition to communicate this way, to navigate the spoken world before the age of two.  It seems our genetic encoding is especially evident when we consider aspects of our relationship to wild nature.  Long-time tracker and notable author, Jon Young, describes a set of intentional behaviors that, when done regularly, will foster ‘deep nature connection’ in humans.  One of these ‘core routines’ is the study of Bird Language, which he outlines in his lovely short book What the Robin Knows.  

Young claims that all humans possess an evolved and inherited capacity to understand and differentiate the five primary sounds of birds, to easily distinguish the local species that are making them, and to map the terrain from these sounds. Birds variously make sounds he describes as either: (1) juvenile begging, when young birds ask for food; (2) territorial aggression, to ward off unwanted ‘others,’; (3) songs; (4) companion or 'contact' calls, those regular 'all's well' messages during shared feeding; or (5) alarm calls.  This last category, alarms, is used by birds to warn other animals (not just other birds), of the location and behavior of a predator, such as a fox, raven, hawk, or bobcat.  Young once told me that he can step out of a dwelling in any suburban neighborhood, and within 10 seconds, know the exact location of the nearest Cooper’s Hawk.  This common bird of prey is an accipiter, hunting other birds by snatching them out of flight.  Once an alarm is sounded, an entire area becomes silent and devoid of movement, remaining this way until the predator has moved on.  Listening to bird language is not just about noting the tapestry of sounds, but also the location of silences.  For obvious reasons, bird language skills are well-developed among living tribal peoples. It was also a skill well-known to our ancestors, and it lies dormant in each of us.  As we re-awaken our innate capacity to comprehend the utterings of our feathered friends, we retrieve our rightful inheritance as people of a living planet, returning once again to our role as stewards of a bountiful and providing earth.   

Jon's wonderful book can be purchased here. 

Intuition

I have two occupations, the confluence of which continues to startle and thrill me.  I am an educator and a professional improvising pianist.  I have taught in public school classrooms, grades 1 through 6, for nearly 20 years.  This past year, I was a school principal, a job that fused many of the approaches and strategies that had proved so successful to me in helping children to find their deeper selves, both as learners and as members of a classroom community. 

As an improvising musician, I have, in the last few years, moved from jazz to free improvisation.  In jazz, I worked within a composed form, a key center, a set of chord changes, generating spontaneous melodic lines on piano that stayed within the harmonic and temporal framework of the given song.  In free improvisation on the other hand, I am not constrained by form, keys, chords, or familiar physical techniques for producing sound.  I surrender fully to intuition, that rare gift bestowed on us by this living planet.  The musical expressions that spring from this sort of intuition, while often unusual in sound, are nonetheless refined by years of practice and training.  So while this kind of music is not predictable or familiar, it is delivered through a deliberate aesthetic, and a honed technique which keeps it from sounding random.

It is my belief that music –and in particular the improvised forms- is a language of the Earth.  In the pulsing, breathing, sentient planet, there is an energy which expresses itself in myriad ways, from the blooming flowers, to the graceful movements of animals, to the flowing shapes of mountains against sky, to the whisperings of the stream as it cascades over rock-laden dips and turns.  Earth constantly expresses a profoundly healing message, and the great human art forms –poetry, painting, teaching, music, loving, dance, drama, etc. –these are all in the business of expressing this Language of the Earth, through the trained human animal.  The more authentic and uninhibited the artist, and the more deliberate and engendered the training, the more luxurious the expression.  Earth is speaking through us, and it is most potent in its message when the artist is not just trained, but also able to move past expectation, ego, competition, self-criticism and analysis, surrendering instead to intuition, honesty, trust, spontaneity and integrity.  It is an amazing thing to experience this kind of pure art, which communicates with our deepest knowingness.  This has less to do with artist and appreciator, and everything to do with an energy moving through the two, an energy always flowing from the earth through living forms, ideas, and experiences, though often invisible or unseen. 

For me, intuition is something we inherit because we are human.  It springs from, and then validates our personal genius.  It comes through our bones, and is unambiguous.  Intuition is a living instruction, a direct impulse, an unflagging certainty to move, act, instruct, intend.  As a teacher, I have been witness to the power of intuition to heal, to solve, to unravel, to reveal, to propel.  In the teacher-to-student dynamic, intuition plays a pivotal role in what Michael Meade and Malidoma Some call “genius to genius mentoring.”  A mentor is first and foremost a fearless advocate for the genius of the mentee.  A mentor sees the gift, trusts its inevitable purpose, calls forth its revelation, and quietly celebrates the child or young person for the integrity and value of this embodied gift.  Unlike parents, mentors are especially believable because they have no agenda or bias. Mentors play a pivotal role in guiding the entire human living and growing project through its myriad transitions.  Parents are guardians, protectors, and nurturers.  Mentors recognize and expressly welcome the gift in the one mentored, and celebrate its emergence.  A society without viable mentoring can become wildly pathological.  Youth, who crave mentoring most conspicuously in the great moment of transition to adult, will apprentice themselves to whatever teachers they can find, and do this most unwittingly.  Whether the guide is a packaged media message, a coalition of online gamers, a dogmatic political or religious cause, or a slightly-older and visibly edgier peer, young people will not attempt the transition without some degree of surrender to a trusted authority.  Culture cannot evolve in the absence of authentic mentors, and no entity nor person can successfully replace a conscientious and aged person to fill that role.  For millennia, our species and our cultures have evolved in response to the mentoring tutelage of genuine elders as they engage youth, and breath the Language of the Earth into these young souls. 

As a teacher, I do not simply parlay state standardized academic content.  Hardly.  I mentor, and I do this with intuition. 

So where has intuition taken me as a teacher?  When I moved into 6^th grade (after several years in early elementary classrooms), I began to hear an ancient calling emerging through the fabric of my growing connections with these early adolescents.  Before teaching, I had studied anthropology, culling a BA and an MA in prehistoric studies and applied medical anthropology respectively.  I had acquired in the process both a respect for and strong intuitive sense of the ways of indigenous peoples.  I had also traveled a good bit, even spending time among the Shipibo Indians of the Amazon.  The gift of these studies and travels was that I became fascinated with my life as a 21^st century homo sapiens who had descended from nomadic tribespeople.  With my 6^th graders, I began to perceive the need to become their tribal elder, and to teach them about our prehistoric past.  We would create elaborate outdoor timelines that stretched for thousands of feet, and which revealed visually our remarkable inheritance as indigenous people who spent 99% of our social history living in wild nature.  On one mile-long ‘timeline’ that meandered through the local hills, the beginning was marked by the first upright human ancestors.  As we walked the course of this timeline, we invented stone tools, made fire, and –in just the last three meters- discovered farming. 

With my 6^th graders, I felt called to get deeply seriously about nature immersion and ritual connections.  My school at that time was located adjacent to several thousand acres of State Park.  Drawing on something I remembered from books by Carlos Casteneda about ‘sit spots,’ I told my students to walk about carefully by carefreely, waiting for the earth to call them to a spot.  Once this happened, they were to commit to returning to that same spot each time we hiked, sitting in that place and becoming open to the winds, the shadows, the living sounds, the feelings.  In addition to sit spots, I encouraged my students to walk in silence, focusing first on what they saw, delivering all attention with all their will, onto the images cascading about their eyes.  Watching not just the flicker of shadows, the movement of leaves, but also to notice that expanse of vision, the periphery as well as the things in the focus range of the eyes.  I later asked them to attend fully to the sounds they were hearing, the winds, the footsteps of classmates, the birds of the sky.  We would move from one sense to another, and then we would try to bring two senses together.  We often walked in a large circle in a clearing to practice this.  First eyes, then ears, then skin and feet, then nose and mouth.  I talked to them about the linear mind, that cognitive tool honed in our 21^st century world, this fabulous machine which when in full swing, trumps the senses entirely.  I cautioned them to notice when their thinking brain was spreading words across the imagination.  I told them how our tribal ancestors had learned to live in the mythical right hemisphere, the sensory apparatuses fully engaged, how their survival was predicated on such illuminatory awareness, and how this capacity had eroded over centuries of post-agricultural living in alienation from wild nature, and yet how this gift of being full alert in nature was something waiting dormant in our bones, fully ready to spring to life again with even modest attention and will. 

My 6^th graders responded deeply to these ideas and practices, which served as the cornerstone of community building in my classroom over nearly 7 years.  On the last day of school, many times, our closing council was full of tears and sadness, as students wondered where they would find community like this again. I told them that they were warriors of a new way of being, that they would carry community everywhere they went, creating it anew because they had felt it deeply, and understood intuitively how that kind of connectedness mattered most. 

I have been transported by the curious muse we call intuition, this uncanny and delightful power that propels my creativity, speaking a language much older than any of us.  The word itself, ‘intuition,’ is treated a bit awkwardly in Present World, seen as the odd stepchild of linear cognition, or perhaps even as a wanderer from some far-away clan who may come to visit for the solstice.  We don’t give intuition serious attention, because it seems to have no source, no roots nor grounding.  It’s either there or it isn’t.  Ideas, on the other hand, are considered the result of careful thinking, in turn the product of schooling.  Intuition is a sort of ‘unseen’ entity, and what we can’t see, we don’t take too seriously, at least not in general public discourse. 

I am delighted by intuition.  I am mesmerized by the force that wells up in a quieted mind, in an impassioned yet attentive moment.  Intuition can become a seed of tremendous action and ideation.  We rarely notice that ideas are born of intuition, not thought.  

Lessons from Connecticut: Schools Must Teach and Test Emotional Intelligence

I'm the principal in a school district that publicly says it is committed to teaching 21st Century Skills. Broadly defined, this include the five C’s of Collaboration, Cooperation, Communication, Creativity, and Critical Thinking. At a minimum, the first three of these require Social Emotional Learning (SEL) to fly. I’ve spent a lot of time recently at principals’ meetings 

that focus on raising district test scores in math and reading. Mind you, my district is among the highest scoring districts in the state of California. The conversation can seem wildly myopic, without anyone appearing to notice. We spend hours talking about academic goals, how to define them and meet them. This focus on numeracy and literacy happens continuously, yet we NEVER talk about teaching and measuring compassion, empathy and other social-emotional skills. Why? Because these are not skills that are used to measure a school's effectiveness. These skills are not tested. Nobody says, "Raise those empathy scores or else!" They do say however, "Raise the math scores or else!" and then if you don't do this well enough, the state will label you a ‘program improvement’ (PI) school district meaning “Improve your [academic] program now or else…!”

Alas, Adam Lanza was called a genius by several of his classmates, but he was not a genius as far as Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is concerned. I am struck by the fact that he was an 'honors student.' How can a school have an honors program, but not teach this boy about honor?

The blame for this tragedy rests on many factors, including a mom who collected guns, an older brother who says he hadn't seen Adam in over two years. Still, I can't escape the conclusion that he spent 6.5 hours per day, 183 days per year, for 13 years, around adults who were not necessarily evaluated on how emotionally well-adjusted he became in their presence, or in response to their teaching, but instead on how high his math and reading scores were. He did well by this narrow measure; after all, he was an honors student!

How 'Core Routines' Can Re-Establish our Deep Connection to Nature

Much has been written about our disconnect from nature.  The topic has been approached from many fields.  Ecopsychologists are examining human thinking and behavior to explain our consistent disregard for environmental collapse.  Evolutionary Psychologists are considering what in our long evolution as hunter-gatherers might shed light on our relationship to earth.  David Abram, the ecophilosopher, in his brilliant book The Spell of the Senuous, reveals how the human mind is intimately linked to terrain and weather, and how the earth itself is a great mind of which we are all an active part. The biologist E.O. Wilson spoke of humankind’s innate love of living things and life-like systems in his landmark book Biophilia.  Paul Shepard, the revolutionary human ecologist who wrote many books, including Nature and Madness, described how the advent of agriculture 12,000 years ago has led to a kind of cultural madness that now expresses itself in outright hostility towards nature. Bill Plotkin is one a number of pioneers in the field of deep nature immersion, using the vision quest to help people discover their inborn gifts, their mythic soul destiny, their true purpose in this life.  Most recently, Richard Louv has written Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder and The Nature Principle, books that have galvanized public awareness of the role of exposure to nature in healthy human development.  In response to Louv’s book, the findings from a large body of scientific literature on the relationship between nature connections and mental health -studies conducted over the past 25 years- have begun to enter mainstream public discourse. 

With this growing scientific evidence for the importance of nature in human development, it is important to consider what kind of nature exposure, or nature engagement can begin the process of healing ourselves and our planet. Many people believe that simply getting into nature is enough, but there is more to the process of nature connection than simple exposure.  Jon Young, co-author of a brilliant book entitled Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature, outlines a number of practices that can awaken our innate, empathetic connection to nature. 

Nearly everyone has had the experience of staring into a fire.  The dance of flames is captivating and mesmerizing. Fire gazing is an ancient human practice, something we have done for close to a million years.  Fire was central to the lives of the early nomadic ancestors who traveled in their small bands into the ice-age north, through Europe and into Asia over 800,000 years ago.  Evenings were spent gathered around the flames, as stories of the day’s activities filled the air.  Lighting the faces of the storytellers, cooking the foods from the hunt, fire also brought safety and warmth to the tribe.  This enduring legacy from antiquity makes fire something we feel in our bones.  Though we left this nomadic lifestyle with the advent of farming some 12,000 years ago, we are still all captivated by the compelling presence of a wood fire.  We spent 99% of our ancestry around this fire. 

I bring up this story of fire and its magnetic pull on our ancestral fibre, because our experience of fire in the 21^st century reveals something of our long social evolution as tribespeople who lived with fire in an intimate and dependent way. 

Some of the practices outlined in Jon Young’s book, what he calls “Core Routines” for developing a connection to nature, are effective precisely because they tap into ancestral ways of knowing, touching those nerves of intuitive sense-making that are buried deep in our tribal bones. Many primitive skills, such as tracking, fire-making, flint knapping, hide tanning, trapping, hunting, plant gathering, herb preparing, basket making, and the like, are profoundly resonant with the deepest aspects of our psyche.  As we learn these skills, something in us already knows how to knap the stone and scrape the hide.  We are sympathetic to these skills innately and intuitively.  “Survival Living” –which involves the development of primitive skills- is one of Young’s dozen or so Core Routines.  Developing nature connection is not done accidentally during the weekend hike, nor through some mysterious osmosis beside the State Park stream, but actively through the practice of behaviors and routines that for hundreds of thousands of years have been the mainstay of daily human behavioral life during the Pleistocene.  Sit Spots, Story Telling, Bird Language, Sensory Expansion, Reverential Awe and Gratitude, Mental Mapping, Animal Mimicry, Intuitive Wandering, Joyful Questioning –these behaviors and others tap into something we already know, something buried deep in our tribal fiber as descendents of traditional nature-based ancestors, awakening a tremendous sense within us that we are imbedded in, and that we belong to, the natural world, this living breathing Mother Gaia. 

You can learn more about Core Routines in Jon Young’s book Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature.  

The Imperative to Guide Youth at Transition

I am very moved by this quote, so share it here: “Like land birds instinctively setting out on transoceanic migration, given assurance, so to speak, from the experience of the species that there is land on the other side, the human adolescent organism reenters the dangerous ground of immature perception on the premise that society is prepared to meet his psychic demands for a new landing –that is, that society is organized to take these refractory youths through a powerful, tightly structured gestation; to test, teach, reveal; to offer as Erikson says, things worthy of their skill; to tutor their suffering and dreaming; and to guide their feelings of fidelity. If the infancy to which they look for an exemplary protocol of growth has been blighted, or if the adult group is not prepared to administer the new and final birth, then the youths create autistic solutions to their own needs and, prolonging the quest of their adolescence, sink finally, cynically, back into their own incompetent immaturity, like exhausted birds going down at sea.” -Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness (p. 65-66).

Descending Into Our Fuller Selves: How Bill Plotkin's "Soulcraft" Defines Soul, Gifts, Initiation and Wild Nature

“The most effective paths to soul are nature-based…Nature – the outer nature we call ‘the wild’ – has always been the essential element and the primary setting of the journey to soul. The soul, after all, is our inner wilderness, the intrapsychic terrain we know the least and that holds our individual mysteries. When we truly enter the outer wild – fully opened to its enigmatic and feral powers – the soul responds with its own cries and cravings”

Since 1980, psychologist Bill Plotkin has helped people discover their deeper gifts through the programs of his Animas Valley Institute, located in Colorado, which leads individuals and small groups on ‘nature-based soul-initiation’ journeys into the wilderness. “As a psychologist, I’ve found that my clients’ discontents are often rooted in an unmet longing for wildness, mystery, and a meaningful engagement with the world.” Plotkin uses the term ‘soul’ to describe that aspect of each individual which is unique, endowed with gifts, often hidden, and directly connected to our own innate ‘wildness’ as sentient animals of this earth. The cultural historian Thomas Berry, in his eloquent foreword to Plotkin’s book, points out that, “soul is fundamentally a biological concept, defined as the primary organizing, sustaining, and guiding principle of a living being…soul gives to the multitude of living forms wondrous powers of movement and reproduction, but even more wondrous powers of sensation and emotion…Such was the understanding of soul in our western world until the sixteenth century when René Descartes (1596-1650) taught that the natural world was simply a mechanistic process to be known simply by scientific measurement” (p. xiii). Plotkin writes, “The individual soul is the core of our human nature, the reason for which we were born, the essence of our specific life purpose, and ours alone…Each of us can bring a unique gift to the world, a world desperately in need of the socially transforming contributions of initiated, actively engaged adults.” Plotkin’s program of initiation, which he calls “Soulcraft,” is premised on the understanding that the living earth, and in particular wild nature, is the most practical and time-tested teacher for awakening our deepest sense of purpose and destiny. “Our society is forever erecting barriers between its citizens and the inner/outer wilderness…But when we escape beyond these artificial barriers, we discover something astonishing: nature and soul not only depend on each other but long for each other and are, in the end, of the same substance.” Plotkin offers a number of critical ideas about ‘soul initiation,’ and how the journey is inward and downward, as opposed to upward and away like the renunciatory paths espoused in many religious traditions, and also some contemporary New Age practices. Plotkin writes, “Although the journey is a spiritual one, it is not a transcendental movement upward toward the light of an ecstatic union with all of creation. It is a journey downward into the dark mysteries of the individual soul…In the mythologies of the world, we find innumerable stories of the hero’s and heroine’s descent into the underworld…Such myths and stories are found in countless cultures. They imply we each must undertake the journey of descent if we are to heal ourselves at the deepest levels and reach a full and authentic adulthood…In contemporary Western cultures, we live as if the spiritual descent is no longer necessary; we live without realizing that the journey is meant for each one of us, not just for the heroes and heroines of mythology.” While our unique ‘gift’ is necessary for the healing of the world, our only responsibility is to seek out and discover our deeper gifts. Once we have done this, and we begin to more actively live within our truer intents and purposes, the healing capacity inherent therein will emerge on its own. “The gift you carry for others is not an attempt to save the world but to fully belong to it. It’s not possible to save the world by trying to save it. You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place. Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift – your true self – is the most you can do to love and serve the world. And it is all the world needs.” Plotkin argues that many ‘adults’ have not truly experienced maturity, and that our world suffers from uninitiated adults. To rectify this, we must all embrace the challenging journey of descent into the soul. “Contemporary society has lost touch with soul and the path to psychological and spiritual maturity, or true adulthood…Successful navigation of this most perilous time in human history requires psychologically and spiritually mature men and women who can engender a mature human species…For thousands of years, we have been living in a culture that ‘protects’ us from the hardships and dangers of the descent…It is a world from which the true elders have largely disappeared, the elders who once possessed intimate knowledge of soul…Knowledge of the mystical journey remains available… always and everywhere found within the souls of each of us and in the remaining wild places of the world.” (all excerpts are from Plotkin’s Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche, California: New World Library, 2003, pp. 1-15).

I Trust the Earth

When I remember what is really going on here, when I feel trees pushing forth new leaves, wind spelling secrets across my face, ground pulling and pushing at me simply because I stand in awe upon this Mother, when I remember my ancestors and know they have reckoned with a sentient earth too, built fires and told stories, when I laugh at the absurdity of a chaotic post-industrialism and the supreme irony of a ‘schooling’ that has made a mockery of the human spirit’s innate love of learning, when I gather these seeds of who I am and what we are, then I can enter the classroom awake, alive, and ready.

My students, those kids who assemble outside my door jostling for a spot of truth in this mirage of make-believe, who insist that tees breath and talk, who know they are ready to break the rules because the artifice of culture is already fractured from tip to tip, who gaze steadily when I mention ancestors, who get real quiet when I utter something about magic, who gallop across the fields when we remember our deepest glories, who will make fire with sticks and tools of stone because it is cooler than video games, these kids are both awaiting a more authentic future, and are willing to ruthlessly and with little grace dismantle all semblances of the artifice. They are untamed but also know that taming is a kind of blinding sometimes. They want to stay awake, alive, breathlessly in awe. They don’t want our path but they want us to point them towards their path. They will ‘behave’ if it is noble to do so, but a fresh nobility must be modeled to them daily, and sometimes the noble path has to be irreverent. They are so tired of hypocrisy and they can’t even spell that word yet. They are ready for the self-discipline of great challenges, but will not settle for the arbitrary or mundane tasks, and they can see the charade a mile away. They are strange little warriors and they will light the future. They will not be spoon fed nor force fed, and they will not listen to nonsense for long. They will learn respect only if the disrespect of the adult world is consistently called out. They will not apologize unless they feel remorse, and sometimes they are afraid to feel at all because reality has gotten so big and wild and exposed.

I am a teacher. I don’t know what that means entirely. I am not the docent of someone else’s standards, I am not laying out a red carpet for the college-bound, I am not molding the obedient citizen, I am not minimizing the deep confusion of growing up in 21^st century complexity. I am responsible to my own growth as a mentor, to the endless yearnings of this earth for proper guides and role models, to the emergence of a New Story that will guide humanity out of systemic violence, and for the embracing and welcoming of each unique spirit that comes right through the eyes of every one of my students. I am mandated to ask questions of everything, to preserve innocence while I also reckon with truth, to insist that content take a back seat to character knowing that meaningful content is waiting for the strong and gentle hands of a mature caretaker. I am listening every day for the guidance that our earth consistently offers each of us. I trust this process. I trust my students and the ancient dance we are in. I trust the earth.

The Ecological Unconscious: Awakening Our Innate Sense of Earth Stewardship is Everyone's Business

Right now our great, life-sustaining earth is in deep peril. There is the very real threat of pending ecological collapse. The message among credible scientists is the same: our human behavior is destroying the environment and at a faster rate than anyone predicted, with significant adverse implications for human populations worldwide. The future viability of our planet to sustain life is at risk.

I am writing this on June 30^th, 2011. Just ten days ago, scientists with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the International Program on the State of the Ocean presented a new report to the United Nations. In a press release entitled, “Multiple Ocean Stresses Threaten Globally Significant Marine Extinction,” two of the report’s conclusions sum up the general tenor of these recent studies; (1) “The speed of many negative changes to the ocean…are faster than anticipated;” and, (2) “Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at a high risk of causing…the next globally significant [mass] extinction event in the ocean.” The report is full of gloomy statistics and dire warnings and it similar to other reports appearing with increasing regularity in the news. Unless we human beings significantly change our behavior –and in particular our emissions of carbon dioxide- we will soon witness rising sea levels, flooding, shifting weather pattern, mass extinctions, and an increase in violent civil unrest as droughts and famines impact vast segments of the world’s population.

Within the environmental movement, a group of psychologists has developed new theories to help explain why human beings are unable or unwilling to alter their destructive behaviors towards the environment despite the obvious threat these behaviors pose to future planetary health and human viability. These ‘Ecopsychologists’ as they are called, argue that human beings are, in actuality, natural environmentalists. Historically speaking, balanced and sustainable relations with the earth have been the predominant paradigm in human cultures. On the timescale of human life on earth, our current exploitative relationships and attitudes of dominance over nature are relatively recent developments. Ecopsychologists argue that our current behavior is a kind of mental pathology or illness and is caused, in part, by our current physical isolation from wild nature, our distance from things of this earth, our prolonged time away from where we were born and grew up in the evolutionary ancestral map of time. This unexpected vacation from our homeland of the naked mother has been the source of our willing disregard for the growing, living, breathing earth.

Looking at the ways in which contemporary indigenous or ‘nature-based’ peoples live, and considering that 99% of human history was spent in similarly-organized tribal groups, it seems that homo sapiens have a ‘natural’ disposition to serve as caretakers of the environment, and that they do this very consciously. Cultural beliefs and practices found among traditional peoples uniformly place human beings in the role earth stewards. There is an imbedded reciprocity, a conscious balance between give and take, an attitude of benevolence towards life and living systems. Tribal peoples are largely animistic, and earth is seen as living and sacred. Gratitude dominates human interactions with plants, animals, and ecological systems, for they are viewed as generously sustaining human life.[1]

Observing the tendency of native populations to avoid exploitive relationships with nature, ecopsychologists argue that post-agricultural, post-industrial human beings who descend evolutionarily from a long nomadic ancestry, must possess an ‘ecological unconscious,’ a hidden sense of earth stewardship that is waiting to be brought back into consciousness. How is this to happen? How are people expected to rediscover their innate tendency to be conscious caretakers of the earth? How are we ‘Moderns’ going to uncover our ecological unconscious and begin creating a sustainable relationship to the planet? While the answers to these questions can be involved and complex, there is growing evidence that simply spending reflective time in nature, hiking, camping, sitting, meditating, walking, observing, listening, and just ‘being’ as opposed to ‘doing,’ can help to awaken our latent sense of environmental stewardship. When done with the conscious intention of becoming more aware of one’s connection to the earth, time spent in nature can be emotionally therapeutic, physically invigorating, and psychologically healing.

If in fact our race to global environmental catastrophe is really happening, part of the New Story must articulate the tremendous responsibility we all have to becoming adequately informed, environmentally conscious, and ecologically mindful. As young people graduate from school, enter the workforce, and express a growing commitment to realizing and expressing their unique individual destinies, adopting –each of them- the role of earth steward seems a requisite for the survival of humanity and our ecosystems. For young people today who become adults in the 21^st century, deliberately behaving in ways that improve our human relationship to nature and becoming conscious agents of social change vis-à-vis the healing of our earth, will no longer be roles that are reserved for environmental activists. Our survival will depend upon broad and collective behavioral change. Schools, therefore, must recognize and adopt the mandate to teach in ways that awaken adolescent sensibilities and commitments to planetary healing.

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[1]In the forward to Bill Plotkin’s Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (California: New World Library, 2003), a book which advocates for transformative, wild-nature immersion experiences as the key to finding one’s ‘gift.’ cultural historian and theologian, Thomas Berry offers lucid thoughts on indigenous peoples’ relationship to nature: “In our association with indigenous cultures, we began to appreciate [that among]…these earlier cultures, the universe was experienced primarily as a presence to be communed with and instructed by, not a collection of natural resources to be used for utilitarian purposes. The winds, the mountains, the soaring birds, the wildlife roaming the forests, the stars splashed across the heavens in the dark of night: these were all communicating the deepest experiences that humans would ever know…Above all, this larger context of human existence was a caring world. It provided food and shelter, and healing in time of sickness. Beyond economic needs, the natural world in all its wonder provided inspiration for song and dance and poetry…the whole of life was thought of as a celebration of existence. There were the anxieties concerning food and shelter, there was sickness and death. Yet so long as there was assistance from the powers of the universe, these could be accepted and dealt with creatively. Suffering and death could be endured without fear because they occurred in a meaningful context of interpretation” (pp. xiii-xiv).

The Need for Vertical Relationships: Rebuilding Present World

Our world is dealing with a big problem of verticality. We are the only mammals that live fully upright, and yet we look forward. We see the horizon, our view is horizontal, and yet we come up out of the earth as vertical beings. Our spirit extends skyward towards the sun, the heavens, and the sky Gods. Our feet touch the earth wherein dwells the Earth Goddess, the Great Mother. We are spirit of sky and soul of earth. Our physical body crosses from earth below to sky above. Our very composite self is dwelling in the under and upper worlds at once and yet we seem to walk through time horizontally, from past through present and into future. We are caught in a dilemma of the crossing of vertical and horizontal. We talk of a third eye that perhaps sees above, but the physical eyes are looking forward. In time, we all die into the dust of the ground, all our molecules decaying and scattering about the soils of the earth. And then also something in is said to simultaneously extend upward towards a reunion with sky and a communion with Spirit. Our death will mean a movement down and a movement up. Again we are destined to verticality of movement, but today we walk across the earth, horizontally, parallel to the ground.

Ancient peoples had a perception of the times past as being home to ancestors who once dwelt among us on earth, and they view times ahead as the domain of grandchildren, the important generations who will come after us. We living ones are seen as standing within time, yet connected in a most conspicuous way with our past and our future through ancestors before and descendents ahead. In real-time living then, there is a clear verticality in the honoring of elders by the young, and the undeniable responsibility to youth among the aged. There is a strong consideration of generations as being bridged vertically through meaningful relationships based in trust and respect. Young people feel the guidance of the aged ones, looking upward across generations with inquisitive and trustful eyes. The elders dutifully glance downward through generations with knowingness, giving wisdom and embracing the vitality of youth just as they temper and harness it with fearless commitment. The tribe is kept alive when vertical relationships are continuously nurtured and sustained.

Today, in Present World, most social relationships are so definitively horizontal. There is an extreme segregation within our schools, those public institutions that consistently group everyone by chronological age. Same-age peers pass the hours together at every step of the way. At the delicate age of transitions –adolescence- peers guide peers, while distrusting the many adults who purvey a most desolate example of maturity and eldership. And grown-ups avoid such young people, fear them even, fear their intensity and their anger, default postures largely cultivated by a society that abandons them when they most need guidance.

The cultural glorification of youth, evidenced in our advertising and media, suggests this is the only meaningful period of life. When billboards show elders, they are pitching arthritis medications, cruise ship tours, or retirement homes. The old ones have no real purpose anymore. Yet they hold the key to a restoration of cultural sanity. They are the wise ones. They have lived and seen hardship, overcome obstacles, and they possess the stories. Our elders must seek out young people, whether at the family reunion, the block party, the schools, wherever they can. Our mature and aged carriers of deep wisdom must cultivate the vertical relationships that have been stolen so recently in our human past.

Once we reconnect vertically across the generations, we will begin to understand the blessing of ancestors, the meaning of the life-stories of heroes, the importance of those who will come after us, look up to us, and learn from us. Our disconnect from the past and future can be healed by connecting with the living past and the living future, which is what happens when elders mentor youth in Present World.

What is Alive? The Budding Animist in Me Speaks His Mind

That an idea could be alive, willful, sentient, is probably the most liberating piece of information I’ve encountered in a very long time. This notion derives from the supposition that life is not the province of animals and plants but rather is an energy force that animates through attention. When I attend to another person, life is generated in the dynamic attention of our beings. Our relationship becomes an entity in itself, responsive to our intentions, our desires and our attentiveness. We can caretake relationships with the same nurturance that we would give a child. We can also neglect relationships and they can wither. The relationship is a living entity. The manner in which we mentally and emotionally consider our relationship to another, can either support the vitality or drain the health of that organism. This organism created by one’s attention to another is both dependent upon and yet independent of the ones attending. It exists as a life force even when neither party is thinking of the other. It lives on its own, and can perish if neglected. Can we live with a level of commitment to how we attend to our world that is commensurate with the idea of myriad life forms born through the quality and focus of our attention? What happens when we live with such care and commitment?

I first came upon this notion while teaching piano privately, with an emphasis on improvisation. In the early stages of this idea’s emergence, I would routinely ask my students to imagine a lonely deserted island of people all thirsting for art and beauty, and suffering miserably from a dearth of such creative expressions. I would ask my students to imagine that, one day, all the people on this desolate island have been called together in a glorious amphitheatre boasting a magnificent sound system. The people are seated, eagerly awaiting a performance. They are silent with anticipation at the promise of some taste of music, something they’ve been deprived of for a very long time. I would tell my students to imagine that the piano at which they sit is somehow directly connected to this far-away amphitheatre filled with people who are hungry for a taste of artistic beauty. “These people are the perfect audience; imagine that every note you play matters,” I would say. “Believe that every ounce of your personal, musical expression will fall upon thousands of appreciative and attentive ears thirsty to take in every drop of your sound without judgment.” I would challenge my students to always seek to play with a level of commitment and responsibility appropriate to such an imagined situation, with this consistent level of discipline and uncompromising focus. At some point over the years of my teaching, I began to change this story, simply asking my students to imagine that the music they played was itself a living thing; that every song was a conscious entity born to their hands, that the moment they touched the instrument a life form entered the world. Such a life could grow healthy and strong with the proper disciplined attention, or it could become ill and unhealthy through our neglect or inattention. The vitality of its very life would be entirely dependent upon the quality of our commitment to it. If we attempted to own a song, it would resist such possessiveness, if we tried to use our playing to impress others, the music would detach from the inspired source of our creative expression, if we neglected it with inattention, it might literally die in our hands. Neglected songs can die a violent death. What level of attention would we musicians play with if we considered every musical rendering to be alive?

Moving away now from music, what if we create life constantly through the quality of our attention and the interplay between subject and object? What if the true nature of ‘life,’ concerned relations between things seen, things attended to, things considered? And I am proposing, to be clear, that something literally ‘comes to life’ between subject and object, and that that thing is vitally alive, infused with a cosmic and miraculous energy moving like wind; forceful, present, if unseen.

We look with awe at the sunset and then that colored sky itself is alive in this dance with our attention. It lives, and that thing which lives ‘knows’ it is the object of appreciation. What if every moment of our existence were an act of creation? If this were the true essence of life, how would we choose to live? How would we attend to our relationships if we understood them to be life-forms in their own right?

I believe we must expand our notion of what is ‘alive.’ We limit life so often to mere physical essences having clearly defined boundaries, such as birds, trees, or people. What if life were not bounded in this way at all, not limited to the edge of my skin? What if life were born in our attention, in the interaction of subject to object, in that relationship? What if such a life-form really did continue to exist even after I turned my attention elsewhere? What if the idea I now hold of my deceased grandmother were a part of, as well as a continuation of, that physical form she once occupied? What if we keep our ancestors alive through our stories about them? Tribal people understand this to be the case. And they understand that mountains are alive and that the ‘spirit’ of a mountain represents a force greater than the ideas collectively held about the mountain. Animistic traditions are based or much more subtle notions than the simple statement that ‘everything is alive.’ Life is an energy, and in a way it is a fusing of energies into something that becomes willful, conscious, aware, intentful. The multitude of cells cooperating to form my body represent a coalition of energies, and “I” now become alive. I train my hands and my mind for many years to manipulate sound waves in complex interactions, and suddenly I play a song on the piano that touches you deeply. I bring into our world in that performance a new life. I guide it gently, intentionally, honestly, in an unbiased way if I can, and then it speaks its language of this Universe, which is a language of love.

And what about ideas themselves? What if ideas are in fact alive? What if everything I am writing here, this idea I am sharing about what it means ‘to be alive,’ this idea that attention creates life, what if this idea I am sharing is alive? What if you the reader –in your response to, attention upon, and interaction with this idea- become its co-creator? What if our ‘togetherness’ around this idea has in this moment birthed and sustained the idea in a way, and what if it is here not just because of either of us, but also in order to touch each of us with its beauty, its playful promise, its wistful dance through our hearts and minds in this moment? What if it has that much intent and goodness, all on its own? The songs I play on the piano do not really come from me. They come through me. I know this well. If I dare to intrude upon the moment of improvisation as a musician with thoughts, goals, intentions or other ‘cognates,’ I immediately know it because the song aches and moans and shivers and weakens in my hands. I back off and try to just let it become what it is. That is the most honest and heartfelt music. The same with ideas. I am a trained ‘thinker,’ scholar, idea scout, thought tracker, and I try my best to let these words move through the hands and mind without too much interference. The idea I have been writing about here, is so fresh that I am very inexperienced at surrendering to its emergence with the same competence as I do with music.

The gifted David Abram helped me to enter the dance of these ideas in his book Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. I’ll close this post with his words:

“How many times has it happened, in the course of going about my work, that a potent thought will make itself felt at the edge of my awareness –an insight whose rightness I can sense even before I know its content- yet when I turn to fix my attention upon it, I find that it has already vanished, leaving only a vague flavor or trace?...The frustration entailed by such phantom thoughts had disrupted my youthful confidence in my own ability, as a philosopher, to reflect upon matters with some accuracy. But I was now beginning to realize another possibility: that ideas had their own lives independent of mine. That indeed some vital ideas were like creatures wholly unaccustomed to human contact, wild notions whose robust elegance and vigor required that they keep their distance from those who might strive to define or domesticate them.”

The Limitations of History, The Magic of Nature-Based Ways

The Problem with Written ‘History’

The ‘historical record,’ the collection of information presented as our shared ‘history,’ presents at least two interesting problems for Moderns. Prior to the written word –something which began in earnest with the ancient Hebrews- the agricultural peoples of Europe and the Middle East and the nomadic tribes-people who came before them- imagined ‘time’ to be a cyclical process. Just as seasons turned each year and the sun rose and set each day, as the moon waxed and waned in a predictable pattern, as breath entered and left the body, as the human heart expanded and contracted with each beat, and as living things were born, grew, aged, and passed on, all things were conceptualized as part of a ‘cycle of return’ (see Mircea Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return*). The invention of writing, and, in particular the introduction of written history, rapidly transformed time into a linear process whereby some thing ‘began’ at a far-away point in the past, and events have since ‘occurred’ just once along a timeline that reaches up to the present.† So the first problem with written history –for a brain that is evolutionarily and cosmologically keyed to cycles- is that history is sequential and linear, and events are static and unique in time and place. However ‘fact-based’ and ‘logical’ this appears to us Moderns, it is juxtaposed against an evolved human psychology which is predisposed to interpret time in a cyclical fashion, with all events recurring over and over again in eternal cycles. If human universals have any relevance –and what we know about tribal cosmology bears this out- a concept of time that is linear and sequential is not ‘organic’ to the way that nature-based humans conceptualize time. For 99% of our self-conscious existence as a species, time has been regarded as cyclical, not linear. Our Present World viewing of time as a sequence of events that have occurred across a linear map of history –however factually consistent with popular views of the universe- alienates us from the cycles of nature, from the predictable birth, death, and rebirth that happens most obviously through the annual seasons. Our own relationship to this seasonal movement through birth, growth, death, and rebirth –in the absence of a cosmology in which we humans participate in cycles of renewal and rebirth- can generate a great deal of anxiety about the meaning of life and about the consequences of death. Whether ignorance is actually bliss, we Moderns would do well to consider the psychological consequences we have incurred by imposing a linear conceptions of history on a brain that evolved with a predisposition to imagine cyclical conceptions of time.

A second concern emanating from a linear view of history is that it sustains a cultural model framed by ‘historical facts.’ We Moderns tell ourselves that we have arrived at this moment in time and have built our ideas and conceptions upon a concrete and factual sequence of historical events that have occurred in a particular way. This is the story we tell ourselves. If we consult the written record, so the idea goes, we can learn all about our ‘past.’ The problem here is twofold. First, historical ‘facts’ are a collection of interpretations, usually written by elite, literate members of ruling classes. If modern Historiography (the study of the methodology of the discipline of history) has taught us anything, it is that written history is laced with fictional interpretations stemming from faulty memory (at best), and intentional deception (at worst). A second problem is that, as an activity, both the composing of historical narrative, and the recounting of written history, are largely rational, linear, and logic-based activities. As such, they are a predominantly undertakings of the left-hemisphere of the brain, and given their prominence in defining who we are, they tend to perpetuate the under-valuing of our right-hemisphere capacities for intuition, creativity, supposition, and mythical ideation. The cultural dominance of a linear perception of history not only alienates us from a meaningful participation with cyclical nature, but also reinforces the very cognitive tendencies that lead us to devalue half of our mental inheritance.

The Hemispheric Proclivities of the Nomad

For 99.9% of our long social history, human growth from infancy to old age depended upon an ongoing interaction with wild, living nature. Our healthy psychological and emotional unfolding was keyed to a subtle stimulus that the organic forms provided. A notable consequence of our current separation from this stimulus is that we have been without this critical ingredient to healthy brain development. As a result, certain more natural tendencies of the mind -evident among contemporary tribal peoples and part of the cognitive repertoire of all ancestral peoples- have been largely denied to Present World peoples. In particular, Moderns do not so readily and regularly quiet the cognitive left hemisphere of the brain; the thinking mind. We do not intuit subtle essences, garner messages from the winds and streams. We do not breath in awareness of our connectedness to all things living, and live in a constant state of graceful balance with the order of life. We live instead with incessant brain chatter and a deterministic commitment to rational, linear thought. We are distrustful of the intuitions and mythic readiness of the right hemisphere. This more mythical mind is activated during prolonged contact with wild nature. A human living as a nomadic hunter-gatherer must move through terrain with a pronounced sense-based awareness. For nature-based peoples, the smells, movements, and sounds of the natural world are keenly observed in an all-at-once fashion during many much of the day. Successful food gathering, animal tracking, weather prediction, landform evaluation and many other activities require an active sensory focus and a quiet cognitive mind. The nomad spends much time in this moving meditation through terrain. This is a right brain activity during which time the neural capacities of the left-brain for speech-based thought are quieted.

The Insights of a 'Nirvanic' Scientist

While the linear, cognitive mind is a remarkable adaptation, it is not the only mind. Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain researcher who suffered a stroke in her left hemisphere, recounts that experience in a lucid and compelling book entitled My Stroke of Insight. She describes the world of the right hemisphere, the intuitive, creative, emotional center of the brain. With her left hemisphere essentially incapacitated by the stroke, she could neither understand speech nor generate speech, yet she describes herself being very conscious and aware of her life. She could not assemble linear thoughts, and yet she understood that there was some hidden secret in the quieting of the linear, cognitive mind. So illuminating was this experience, that she says she fought death, lying on her hospital bed, so should could heal from the stroke and recount her experiences to others. Her will to live was driven by a desire to spread a message gained during those dark moments in the hospital bed. As she recounts in one of many speeches she has given about her experiences, this one recorded for TED, an online archive of talks by first-rate thinkers,

"On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman’s body…The right hemisphere is all about the here and now. It thinks in pictures. It learns through the kinesthetic movement of our bodies….Our left hemisphere is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks serially, methodically…Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it’s all about the future. The left hemisphere takes that collage of the present moment and picks out details... It categorizes and organizes that information, associates it to everything we’ve learned in the past, and projects onto the future all of our possibilities. It thinks in language, the ongoing brain chatter that connects the me of my internal world to the external world. It’s that little voice that says to me ‘I am’ and as soon as it says this, I become separate.

This is the part of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke…When the chatter of my brain completely stopped, I was captivated by the energy around me. I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body. I felt huge. My left hemisphere then came back on line and said, ‘Hey we got a problem, we got a problem!!!!!’. But then I would return again to the place I call ‘la la land.’ When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life…I was suspended between two worlds….I just wanted to escape…I felt enormous and expansive like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free…I found nirvana. I remember thinking there would be no way to squeeze the enormity of myself back into my little body. But then I realized that I’m still alive, and I’ve found nirvana. And if I can find nirvana and I’m still alive, then everyone who is still alive can find nirvana. And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at anytime. And that they could purposefully choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover…It took me eight years to completely recover.

So, who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds, and we have the power to choose moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are, I am, the life force power of the universe…at one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, Neuroanatomist. These are the ‘we’ inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when?

I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.” –Jill Bolte Taylor, author of My Stroke of Insight. This excerpt is from her very popular videotaped lecture on TED.

May we step again into a world where flaring nostrils, bifocal vision, hyper-sensitive hearing, and deep appreciative awe for the majesty of our bountiful earth are not relegated to secondary status, step-children under the shadow of the brilliant if suspect renderings of the cognitive left-hemisphere that has so much dominated our lives and ways. May we become more balanced, more awake, more conscious. ~End

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*Current projections about the Big Bang being an outward expansion of time and space that will eventually slow and collapse, only to explode outward again in an unending multi-billion-year pulsing of Big Bag and Big Collapse, points to a primary cyclical phenomenon at even the most macrocosmic level of the physical universe.

†In A Post-historic Primitivism, Paul Shepard writes, “The hidden truth of history is that the more we know, the stranger it all becomes. It is human to want to know ourselves from the past, but history’s perspective narrows that identity to portraits, ideology and abstractions to which nation states committed human purpose. True ancestors are absent. The meaning of our lives, of nature, of purposeful animals, of simple societies, of everything in this past is in doubt. We do not feel our ancestors looking over our shoulders, or their lives pressing on our own. Once we have shaken off that mythic immersion and put on the garment of dry history, we are unable to shed the attachment and skepticism that define the Western personality.”