The Last Child in the Woods

As a mother of two small children and as a beneficiary of a childhood spent on a large farm in the country, I realize the importance of fostering a close connection between my children and the natural environment.  Because of this strong belief in maintaining the connection with nature, I guide my children there and foster their love for natural places.  We regularly spend days at the beach, we go hiking, we have favorite picnic spots on rivers, we swim in alpine lakes, we camp often, we participate in a nature club with a group of friends where we regularly go to wild places, and we go backpacking in the wilderness.  Many of our friends enjoy similar experiences, but, alas, this is not the norm.

In his book, "Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder," Richard Louv laments that:

our society is teaching young people to avoid direct experience in nature.  That lesson is delivered in schools, families, even organizations devoted to the outdoors, and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many of our communities.  Our institutions, urban/suburban design, and cultural attitudes unconsciously associate nature with doom-- while dissociating the outdoors from joy and solitude.  Well-meaning public-school systems, media, and parents are effectively scaring children straight out of the woods and fields.

It is important that we care about and rebel against this trend because:

at the very moment that the bond is breaking between the young and the natural world, a growing body of research links our mental, physical and spiritual health directly to our association with nature-- in positive ways.  Several of these studies suggest that thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can even be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorders and other maladies.  As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they very well need contact with nature.

Indeed, in the most nature-deprived parts of our societies, we can see the rise of what might be called a cultural autism with symptoms including tunneled senses and feelings of isolation and containment.  This has clearly been the trend with the wide-ranging worship of the secondary experience offered by technology: television, computers, cell phones, internet "socializing," or video games.  But where do we achieve "primary experience"-- that which we can see, feel, taste, hear, or smell for ourselves?  In our modern "machine culture," it is shockingly lacking.

North Carolina State University professor Robin Moore directs a research and design program that promotes the natural environment in the daily lives of children.  According to Moore:

Children live through their senses.  Sensory experiences link the child's exterior world with their interior, hidden affective world.  Since the natural environment is the principle source of sensory stimulation, freedom to explore and play with the outdoor environment through the senses in their own space and time is essential for healthy development of an interior life.

We all love our children, and so many of us spend great amounts of time and money to purchase our children computers for learning or sign them up for classes and organized sports.  We are literally running from the moment we awaken. And so are our children... Is there a better way?  I remember spending hours sitting in the river catching crawdads, tadpoles or frogs.  I could be "lost" for hours with the baby animals born on our ranch.  Or I could walk for miles looking for rocks and arrowheads.  I'd trade a computer for these experiences any day.

Yet it is not so easy anymore for us increasingly growing masses of urban folk.  So what can we do?  Louv offers a great list of 100 actions we can take in his companion field guide.  The following are a few of my favorite:

1. Send your kids outside to play in the dirt.
2. Invite native flora and fauna into your life by replacing part of your lawn with native plants and maintaining a birdbath in your garden.
3. Regularly visit nature as an antidote to stress.
4. Tell your children stories about your special childhood places in nature.
5. Make the "green hour" a new family tradition (www.greenhour.org), a time for unstructured play and interaction with the natural world.
6. Go for a hike!
7. Invent your own nature game.
8. Keep a "wonder bowl" where you can keep all of your children's collected treasures from nature for display.
9. Keep a nature journal with your children.
10. Go harvesting at local you-pick farms.

We are now building the foundation for our children's adult lives.  Richness of experience will help them to build survival skills-- for both in the natural world as well as in the urban jungles.  Help them to build these survival skills, and then help them to thrive by regularly taking them outside to engage with the natural world in unstructured wild play.

Embodiment

In our age of massive industrial production, surreal consumption, euphoric communication and fictitious digital environments, we continue to live in our bodies in the same way that we inhabit our houses, because we have sadly forgotten that we do not live in our bodies but are ourselves embodied constitutions.  Embodiment is not a secondary experience; the human existence is fundamentally an embodied condition.  Today, our senses and bodies are objects of ceaseless commercial manipulation and exploitation.  Physical beauty, strength, youth and virility are adored in the realms of social values, advertising and entertainment.  In case we fail to possess ideal physical qualities, our bodies are turned against us as causes of deep disappointment and guilt.  With ever-accelerating frequency, all our senses are exploited by consumer manipulation, yet at the same time these very same senses continue to be undervalued as prerequisites of our existential condition or as educational objectives.  Intellectually, we may well have philosophically rejected the Cartesian duality of body and mind, but the separation continues to rule in cultural, educational and social practices.

Human conscious is an embodied consciousness and we are connected with the world through our senses.  Our hands and entire body possess embodied skills and wisdom.

-Juhani Pallasmaa from The Thinking Hand

The Enchantment of Gaia and the Split Between Wild Earth and our Wild Natures

Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox!  This is what is the matter with us, we are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from it's stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep blooming in our civilized vase on the table.

-D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

What Would you do if you Came Upon a Blue Tree?

Would you stop to wonder?  Could you just pass it by as you might any other tree?  Would you make a judgment about the rightness or wrongness of such a sight?  Would you smile?  Frown? 

I've not come across any blue trees near my home, but if one goes to Seattle, Sacramento, Houston, or about nine other public installation locations, you'll find them.   Sculptor and performance and installation artist, Konstantin Dimopoulos explains that he creates artworks that "are grounded in my sociological and humanist philosophies.  In my environmental installation, The Blue Trees,  the colour and the Tree come together to transform and affect each other; the colour changing the Tree into something surreal, something out of this world. While the Tree, rooted in this earth reflects what we may lose."

Think about it, Dimopoulos, has made the passerby stop when he would not otherwise have.  And she does think.  Yes, we have had our impact on the trees, and here it is obvious.  Elsewhere, we might not notice.  So, also in The Blue Trees installation, the trees, a part of the natural world, are impacted by humans, yet here Dimopoulos has given them a voice.  They call out to us to bring all trees to mind.  We are jarred out of our lackadaisical hypnosis, and we are compelled to know more.

And when enough people stop to question, we can no longer idly allow the decimation of our forests in a mass of anonymity.  We become accountable.  And in this step, I see Dimopoulos as having succeeded beautifully poetical in his artworks.

Dimopoulos tells us that he has "always known that art is and has always been an extended part of nature and that art can effect social change.  For that to happen one has to move out of the art institutions and galleries and move outside among nature and human beings in their living spaces."  I couldn't agree more!  To learn more visit http://www.kondimopoulos.com/thebluetrees/about/.

Hurray for the Trees!

An ancient tree is more than a beautiful plant, it is our wise teacher and guide.  Each of us can think of a moment when we felt a sense of being overcome with the beauty of an ancient tree upon entering the cathedral of an ancient forest.  The feeling grips us immediately; we are in awe.  So many of us then react by pulling out our cameras or cell phones and quickly posing ourselves or companions in front of these ancient creatures and snapping a few photos as we take a quick loop then move on to the next "attraction."  Not too many of us, linger, sit beneath our teacher and ask for some of it's wisdom.  If you do, I urge that you will be richly rewarded.

I have a friend who received a vision that God is a tree.  I am not disinclined to believe her.  Or perhaps, God is in everything, and if we take a moment to listen to the lessons of the ancients, we become closer to God.  After all, Adam and Eve dwelled in a garden and their lives and their fall from this original home are significantly intertwined with the tree-- the "tree of life", the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil."  Buddha receives his enlightenment sitting beneath the Bodhi Tree.  And the American Indians worship nature, traditionally living within, and not against, the natural rhythms of Nature.


I've stopped watching television.  It has been about five years now.  From time to time, when I visit a friend or family member, or I catch a glimpse of television at a public place, I am suddenly assaulted by the speed, the tone and the flashiness flickering across the screen.  It is not natural.  And it does not teach the lessons of the Ancients.  To me it is hollow, and hollowing.  I become discouraged, my thoughts distracted.  There is no Holy here.  There is no enlightenment.

The calendar tells us it is the beginning of a new year.  Yet winter still caries us through our natural little death until we are reborn in the spring.  For me, this is a time of finishing my resting, but anticipating the energy of rebirth.  I indulge my introspectiveness knowing that soon will be the time to follow through with the new year's rebirth.

This year, I would like to encourage you, all of my friends, to also indulge your own introspection and to turn to our ancient teachers, the lovely trees.  Go to a park such as in Big Sur or Big Basin, Grant Ranch or Sanborn.  Take a walk in your neighborhood.  Or go sit beneath the ancient tree in your own yard.  Touch it and, yes, speak to it.  Open up and it will communicate back!

Design in the flow

I know few who live outside the tyranny of speed.  I lament that despite my efforts, I am continually holding myself back from what I would rather do, because I am compelled to drudge through what I "should" do.  Speed in all its forms: efficiency, responsibility, performance, financial stability all scream their threats should I consider interrupting work for lunch with a friend, talking too long with a client on personal terms, or going for a mid-day hike.  Occasionally I rebel and I am richly rewarded with increased inspiration.  As a struggling student myself, I offer these thoughts.

It is not natural to think in terms of speed.  This way of thinking disconnects us from nature and hinders us from connecting with one-another.  Nature, including humans, is inclined to move in terms of rhythm as opposed to measured beats (I think this is why the ticking clock drives me crazy, and music and dance energize me).  When we move rhythmically, when we think rhythmically, when we breathe rhythmically, indeed, when we live rhythmically, we flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, noted for his work in the study of happiness and creativity, coined the term "flow."  He describes this state of being as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.  Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."  

When in "the flow" we feel truly alive.  In contrast, Austrian philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich laments, "speed is in conflict with aliveness.  It is a crude example of historical congeries gratuitously attributed to nature. It comes out of a bodiless lust that lies deeper than the major assumptions on which the modern world is built."

I relate this very natural need to remove oneself from the observance of the ticking of the clock to connecting deeply to a place.  We feel "at home," and somehow, we know it despite the fact that it surprises us that we know it.  We happen upon "home."  But how many of us truly become the creators of home?  How many of us utilize our sort of sixth sense to feel that we have, if for just moments, found ourselves in harmony?  How many of us understand how important it is, and I would argue even essential to create a place that enables a life of harmony where we can rhythmically experience our world?

As a designer, I am compelled to join my clients with a place of harmony, where they feel at home, where the clock ceases to click away.  I feel I have achieved success when I can help my client through place tune into rhythm which leads them to "the flow" which in turn leads to connecting with, indeed sensing, primal energies with a sort of sixth sense which leads one to a feeling of true aliveness.

The Energy of a Space

Everything is energy, therefore "energetic."  Imagine the world and everything in it composed of vital energy or a life force which vibrates at different frequencies.  This energy moves through space and around every living being, having originated from the sun, the earth and the air.  When the energy is dense, we can see it.  More fluid, less dense, ephemeral energy, often touches us without conscious awareness of how we have been touched by it.  Some of us are more inclined to sensing this more ephemeral energy, while others can learn to tune in to this energy.

I sometimes enter a garden, or a home, or an urban space, or a forest, or a cathedral and I can strongly feel the energy of the space.  Look at these images for example:

Looking through this obscured doorway invokes my curiosity.  My energy level rises as I wonder what is on the other side, and I am drawn through the portal.

This natural scene is peaceful, serene and contemplative.  My energy level relaxes and I feel soothed.

This lively city space is high energy; I feel activity in every corner of the space.

 It is important to take this energy into consideration when getting to know a space and planning for its transformation.  The space will have an existing energy inherited from the existing plants, wildlife, furnishings and surfaces.  It will also bear the energy of former residents, and past events that took place in the space.  This energy may be beneficial and should be retained to add to the garden transformation.  Other energy, such as neglect or harshness should be transformed.  

It is also important to consider the future intended energy to occupy the space.  Is the space intended for entertainment and activity?  Or is it instead intended for finding peace after a busy day of life.  The elements that we bring into the future garden should reflect the intended future energy.  Although we do not naturally understand a space in such terms, we are affected by it whether we recognize the effect or not.  Each garden that I get to know and create anew receives such consideration during my design process.  It is equally important as the aesthetics and the functionality as it is essential to the excellence of both of these realms.