Reciprocity and Kinship with Nature as Health Pt. 1

Part 1

Today, I sit down to write not because I'm feeling eloquent, but because there are massive wildfires burning along the entirety of the West coast, and nothing I could say could feel more important than that. I feel heartbroken for our living ecosystems, for the break in our sacred bond with everything that makes our lives possible through the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the shelter we inhabit, and the exquisite beauty that ignites my sense for how wonderful it is to be here and be in relationship with this planet as a part of nature. We are nature. We are nature. We are nature. And we are in deep need of a mature and liberated consciousness that has the ability to perceive the animated force of consciousness in all things. 

My thoughts are full, and have been for some time with the words of indigenous writers, activists, poets, and naturalists. Everything from how we must change our language to reflect the rights, sovereignty, and reciprocity of all beings, plants, animals, rivers, forests, and mountains, and how to pay attention-- with patience-- to the language of these beings-- that we may know and even discover that knowing has its own nature, divided among every creature, every life. I find myself listening to the birds, feeling their call in my throat, and feeling safe alone in the woods when I can hear their voices. And the colors of the bravest flowers of early spring, how the energy of boldness and anger coalesce to push up and out against the forces of gravity to burst open every tight lidded seed. How the Earth gives, holds, nourishes, brings to fruition because that is its nature as a womb of life, and it does so indiscriminately. The impartiality of its giving has been a mirror for me and taught me so much about what it is to love. Isn't this love-- the wanting to give something? 

In an On Being interview between Krista Tippet, Robin Wall Kimmerer says, 

"In talking with my environmental students, they wholeheartedly agree that they love the earth. But when I ask them the question of “Does the earth love you back?” there’s a great deal of hesitation and reluctance and eyes cast down, like, oh, gosh, I don’t know. Are we even allowed to talk about that? That would mean that the earth had agency and that I was not an anonymous little blip on the landscape, that I was known by my home place. So it’s a very challenging notion, but I bring it to the garden and think about the way that when we, as human people, demonstrate our love for one another, it is in ways that I find very much analogous to the way that the earth takes care of us, is when we love somebody, we put their wellbeing at the top of a list and we want to feed them well. We want to nurture them. We want to teach them. We want to bring beauty into their lives. We want to make them comfortable and safe and healthy. That’s how I demonstrate love, in part, to my family, and that’s just what I feel in the garden as the earth loves us back in beans and corn and strawberries. Food could taste bad. It could be bland and boring, but it isn’t. There are these wonderful gifts that the plant beings, to my mind, have shared with us. And it’s a really liberating idea to think that the earth could love us back, but it also opens the notion of reciprocity that with that love and regard from the earth comes a real deep responsibility." 

Our kinship with nature is fundamental to our growth, development, sense of belonging, and overall health and wellbeing. Our reciprocity with plants, animals, and all other beings is what humanizes us. This doesn't have to look like what we would traditionally consider to be conservation work, but simply just taking a pause and noticing what's happening around us. Noticing where plants grow, appreciating the incomprehensible journey a salmon makes every year, noticing how bees communicate through dance, noticing how landscapes shape our interaction and feeling of the world. This is the work of pleasure. A good example of how our kinship with nature can be honored and sustained is through ceremony and ritual. Ceremonies and rituals are important for us as human beings, as they draw our attention to the forces at play in a specific time, giving honor to our place in the world and the processes unfolding at that time. They are an acknowledgement of our belonging, a totem of life. 

The Kogi people of Columbia are a pre-columbian indigenous tribe and representatives of the kind of consciousness we could stand to learn a great deal from. According to The Guardian's article What Columbia's Kogi People can Teach Us About the Environment, "At the heart of the tribe's belief system is "Aluna," a kind of cosmic consciousness that is the source of all life and intelligence and the mind inside nature too. Aluna is something that is thinking and has self-knowledge. It's self-aware and alive. All indigenous people believe this, historically. It's absolutely universal. Many Kogi people are raised in darkness for their formative years to learn to connect with this cosmic consciousness and, vitally, to respond to its needs in order to keep the world in balance. Aluna needs the human mind to participate in the world – because the thing about a human mind is that it's in a body," [explains filmmaker Alan] Ereira. "Communicating with the cosmic mind is what a human being's job is, as far as the Kogi are concerned."

Movie link: http://www.alunathemovie.com/

In another On Being interview featuring Michael McCarthy, journalist and naturalist, and author of The Moth Snowstorm he makes a strong, yet maybe unintended, argument for human health and wellbeing by stating, [It has only been]"500 generations of what we call civilization compared to the 50,000 generations when we were part of nature. In nature is where we evolved; where we became what we are, where we learned to feel and react, where the human imagination formed, where we found our metaphors and similes.” 

He goes on to draw a comparison between "human" instinct and bird behavior in an attempt to show us how our fundamental human nature has shaped our interactions with the natural world. I am so in wonder about how many other behaviors and instincts go unnoticed and how bio-mimicry continues to inform our instinct and behavior today. If I couldn't be a Chinese medicine and integrative mental health practitioner, I would definitely be a naturalist. 

"Nial Moores is birdwatcher, a birder. But what he specializes in is what we would call waders and what you guys call shorebirds. And he spent years and years and years looking at shorebirds and other birds and the way in which they move through landscapes, the principal motivation of which is to see and not be seen. And what he gradually came to realize was that people still move through landscapes in this way. It’s still deeply within us. For example, if you watch people go into a square, very often they will walk around the edges of it without even realizing they’re doing it, rather than cross it; rather than going across the open middle, where they are very visible. And there are numerous such ways in which — what you were referring to then is that I do say that nature’s not paradise. If you think nature’s paradise, you’re mistaking it, because nature has wonderful things, but it also has great dangers, and nature can kill you. But the point I was making is that these are our dangers. These are the dangers that we evolved to be familiar with; whereas, much of modern life, from everything from central heating to automobiles to modern sewage disposal to air travel — that’s not what we evolved to be at peace with. And so, perhaps, the only place we can be truly at peace is in the natural world." 

I love how McCarthy draws our attention to the co-evolution of humans in the natural world- that our 50,000 generations of time spent there is where the body, brain, and nervous system learned to be human. That there is no escaping nature as a human being- it is our home, heritage, and psychic origins. Could this also be why we experience so many stress related disorders in our modern time, because we have broken with our natural home and live in contrived systems that make it difficult for our nervous systems to recognize as dangerous or safe? I only have more and more questions. 

One of my favorite poets is the late Mary Oliver. A champion for waking early and walking into the forest as the world comes to life, she knew the value of regular communing in nature. This is her poem titled "Wild Geese." 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Further Reading:

Speaking of Nature: Finding language that affirms our kinship with the natural world by Robin Wall Kimmerer  https://orionmagazine.org/article/speaking-of-nature/

Excerpts: 

"Beyond the renaming of places, I think the most profound act of linguistic imperialism was the replacement of a language of animacy with one of objectification of nature, which renders the beloved land as lifeless object, the forest as board feet of timber. Because we speak and live with this language every day, our minds have also been colonized by this notion that the nonhuman living world and the world of inanimate objects have equal status. Bulldozers, buttons, berries, and butterflies are all referred to as it, as things, whether they are inanimate industrial products or living beings."

"While it’s true that words are simply vessels for meaning, without meaning of their own, many cultures imbue the utterance of words with spirit because they originate with the breath, with the mystery of life itself. In her book Becoming Wise, Krista Tippett writes, “The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how we interpret the world, how we treat others. Words make worlds.”