“i keep hearing
tree talk
water words
and i keep knowing what they mean.”
LUCILLE CLIFTON
ALICE WALKER, THE POET, essayist, and novelist whose writing crosses every boundary—even that between humans and nature—found her only privacy as the youngest child in a big Southern, rural family by leaving a crowded house to walk in the fields or sit under a tree to read her much-loved books and write her first poems. Nature was a refuge from the long hours of cooking and cleaning expected of the only daughter living at home with hardworking parents and older brothers. Though she now lives in San Francisco and loves its ethnic variety, she still retreats to the quiet countryside to write and to restore her energy and peace. As the millions who love her work know, trees, flowers, and animals are often sentient characters within her writing. Indeed, it’s partly this empathy with nature and with country people all over the world—people who often share more with their counterparts a million miles away than with their own nation’s big cities—that have made The Color Purple and other of Alice’s works just as popular in Japan or Australia, in Brazil, Africa, or China, as they are here at home.
My own childhood was almost the opposite. Our family was small, and there was nothing if not privacy in our house, for my mother had withdrawn into a world of her own and my father was often on the road. The fields and trees outside our house in southern Michigan seemed to be only a colder, emptier extension of the isolation inside, and I longed to escape into the animated world I knew from the movies that I begged my father to take me to, or the radio serials and novels that were my idea of what “real life” should be like. Even after my parents separated and my mother and I moved to an old house in Toledo—next to a vacant lot where she sometimes tried to grow hollyhocks amid the refuse, because she herself loved gardens—I still associated any expanse of greenery with sadness, emptiness, and defeat. I hoped one day to live in one of the world’s great cities—New York or Bombay, Rome or Hong Kong—which to me meant freedom, excitement, and all the promise of adulthood. Even today, I still work best and feel happiest when I’m sitting, as I am now, in a corner of an urban room, safe in the knowledge that all the choices of a great city lie just outside my door.
Alice and I find each other’s preferences a little mysterious. One constant of our long friendship is our mutual attempts at conversion—my hoping to persuade Alice to come to New York and enjoy the infinite variety and energy of its streets (which she sometimes does, though she always goes home with relief), and her suggesting that I buy land next to hers in the hills of Northern California (which I also visit and enjoy, though some part of me wants to walk to a corner drugstore). Neither of us ever quite succeeds in converting the other.
I say this because I’ve noticed that, like Alice and me, most people have some early association that either attracts them or drives them away from nature. When it’s negative, we often justify it instead of figuring out where such alienation came from. During all my years of trying to ignore my childhood, for instance, I insisted that I had just chosen a different energy source: urban crowds. Like a great waterfall or a stand of pine trees in the wilderness, I argued, crowds of people were also a natural resource from which we could draw strength. There is some truth in this argument—we do get energy from groups of our own species—but I doubt that many of us feel renewed by the dead concrete and steel in which they gather. Even urban planners in love with high-rise cityscapes know that blocks of inanimate buildings must be broken up by an occasional park or tree. Try imagining Manhattan without its 843-acre Central Park, Calcutta without its green Maidan and banyan trees, or Buenos Aires without its tree-lined boulevards exactly like those in Paris.
Once I began to uncover the reasons I had invested landscapes with such loneliness, I also realized that there were some parts of nature that had always given me comfort: tropical beaches, any desert, English gardens, the sight of the ocean; in other words, anything that wasn’t a reminder of my Midwestern childhood. Even two people as different in our experience as Alice and me were attracted to many of the same elements of nature—especially the ocean. As Herman Melville wrote in Moby-Dick, “Take almost any path you please, and ten to one” it will lead to water. “Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy?” he asked. “Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity?” Because: “There is magic in it.” Standing at the edge of this mysterious three fourths of the planet from which we all evolved, we feel returned to some authentic, calming, inner core of ourselves, as if the mere sight of it could wash away all artifice and confusion. Given the power of my response to the ocean, I always thought it was strange that I also loved the desert, until poet and novelist Leslie Silko—who grew up hearing stories of the earth’s origins from her Laguna Pueblo family—explained it to me one day as we rode ponies near her Arizona home. “Of course you love the desert,” she said. “It used to be the ocean’s floor.”
Following an instinctive pull toward this or that part of nature takes us back to our natural roots, but many of us have been so educated out of those instincts that we think all progress lies in leaving nature behind. We’ve learned to respond to its power with “feminine” distance and fear, or “masculine” aggression and control. Having been led down this nongarden path of separation from nature by learning, however, we can unlearn our way back just by looking at everyday life.
Consider our bodies. Just as the planet is three-fourths ocean, our bodies are three-fourths water. When we shed tears or drops of perspiration, they are salty, too. Like the tides and all living things, our bodily processes are influenced by the moon’s gravitational pull. Indeed, from conception to birth, each human embryo recapitulates all the stages of human evolution, from a few cells floating in amniotic fluid to a mammalian creature emerging on land. These and many other physical parallels can show our minds what we know in our bones: that each of our bodies contains all the processes of nature.
Consider our speech. Centuries of societies and religions have tried to separate us from nature, but they haven’t eliminated from our common parlance those phrases that betray its magnetism. Even in modern parlance that is most estranged, there are some expressions—“back to nature,” “at one with nature,” “communing with nature”—that convey the pleasure of being in touch with all that is deepest and truest in our inmost selves. Nature is not a metaphor for us. It is us.
Consider our cultures. If people regard themselves as part of nature—from the preindustrial indigenous cultures that still survive on most continents to postindustrial ecological settlements—they tend toward a communal, circular paradigm that is modeled on the cycles of birth-growth-death-and-rebirth. If they measure progress by their conquering of nature, they create a hierarchical paradigm, with groups considered “closer to nature” on its lower rungs. In other words, even if we as individuals don’t value ourselves according to our closeness to or distance from nature, the hierarchical societies we live in will do it for us. As Marilyn French wrote in Beyond Power, her historian’s diagnosis of patriarchy: “No really profound sense of human equality can ever emerge from a philosophy rooted in a stance of human superiority over nature.”1
Unlearning this cultural paradigm of “Man” versus “Nature” will take even longer than creating cultures that unify the “masculine” and “feminine” parts of our selves, but cracking our belief in its universality begins its destruction. Just as a blade of grass growing through a crack in concrete will eventually shatter it, the idea of each of us as an integral part of nature begins to take root. The self as a microcosm of nature’s power is a more life-affirming kind of imagery than the notion that our progress depends on our ability to stamp out the natural forces within us—which is, of course, impossible.
Because males in industrialized countries have been asked to value themselves according to their distance from nature, for instance, they have tried to ignore their biological cycles; that is, cycles that follow the daily, monthly, and yearly movements of the moon and the sun. Though menstruation makes women’s cycles more obvious, men also have cycles that can be determined by dividing the number of days since their birth by twenty-eight. When a railway company in Japan asked its male employees to do this to discover the days on which they were more accident-prone, its accident rate was cut more drastically than it had been by any other measure. If men are supposed to be less governed by cycles than they really are, however, women are punished by the idea that we are more governed than we really are. Thus, men are found wanting when they don’t measure up to a rocklike, John Wayne constancy, and women are seen as flawed because we are thought to be hostages to overwhelming biology. The result is that both sexes are penalized, and neither is encouraged to learn how to use cycles by going with their natural energy.*
Our sensitivities to the circadian, twenty-four-hour rhythms of light and dark also give us such common experiences as jet lag. Studies of workers who upset their biological clocks by sleeping by day and working by night—especially those who change shifts frequently—show a higher than average incidence of mood and medical problems and accident. Recently, some people suffering from lack of energy and recurring depression in seasons when daylight hours are shorter have been diagnosed as having “seasonal affective disorder” (SAD), a newly named syndrome affecting people who are especially light-sensitive, whose treatment consists of sitting for a few hours daily in front of a special light box that sheds full-spectrum light.
Not only is each human being a microcosm of nature, but so is each living cell, circadian rhythm and all. Healthy cells have a metabolic high and low point of activity during the course of each day. One of the ways cancer cells betray their perversity is by inverting this daily cycle. Thus, when healthy cells are least likely to multiply, cancer cells are most likely to multiply; a fact with significance for the timing of radiation, chemotherapy, and other treatments aimed at inhibiting the growth of the latter without damaging the former. Cyclical rhythms have long been taken into consideration when giving medications for “morning” or “evening.” The importance of such timing was proven over again when amphetamines were given to rats at the low point of their daily cycle of hormones and body temperature, and 6 percent of them were killed. When the same dose was given to their siblings, but timed to the high point of their daily cycle, more than 75 percent were killed. During that daily peak, their brains had been producing their own amphetamines and thus caused an overdose—another instance of proving at animals’ expense what is already known from human experience.
But to truly unlearn an artificial self and discover a true one, we need to add to the mind’s understanding of examples like these by reconnecting with nature in an immediate sensual way. One extraordinary woman who has done just that has made it her life’s work to help others find those links, too.
Jean Liedloff was born in New York, but as an eight-year-old going to summer camp in Maine, she had a transforming experience. Lagging behind during a nature walk through the woods, she happened on a glade with a fir tree at one side, a knoll covered with luminous green moss at the center, and the afternoon sun lighting the whole scene against a dark forest. It was “a magical or holy place.”
“The whole picture had a completeness, an all-there quality of such dense power that it stopped me in my tracks,” she wrote later. “I felt the anxiety that colored my life fall away. This, at last, was where things were as they ought to be.” She lay down with her cheek against the moss and promised herself that every night for the rest of her life, she would visualize this magical place before she went to sleep.
I knew, even at eight, that the confusion of values thrust upon me by parents, teachers, other children, nannies, camp counselors, and others would only worsen as I grew up. The years would add complications and steer me into more and more impenetrable tangles of rights and wrongs, desirables and un desirables. I had already seen enough to know that. But if I could keep The Glade with me, I thought, I would never get lost.
She kept this memory of “wholeness” and “rightness” for a long time. Then with adolescence, it began to dim.
“By the time I was about fifteen, I realized with a hollow sadness (since I could not remember what I was mourning) that I had lost the meaning of The Glade.”
Later, after the death of her grandmother with whom she had been living, she left college and went to Europe. “My thoughts were not very clear during my grief,” she explained, “and because turning to my mother always ended in my being hurt, I felt I had to make a giant effort to get on my own feet. Nothing I was expected to want seemed worth having—jobs writing for fashion magazines, a career as a model, or a further education.
“In my cabin on the ship bound for France, I wept for fear I had gambled away everything familiar to me for a hope of something nameless. … I wandered about Paris sketching and writing poetry. I was offered a job as a model at Dior, but did not take it. … I still could not have said what I was looking for.”
When two young Italians invited her to join their expedition to South America, she accepted without knowing why. After a month of difficult travel up a small, unexplored river in Brazil, she, her Italian companions, and two Indian guides made a base camp. Sitting down with a book one day, she
found a seat among the roots of a large tree that overhung the river. I read … not daydreaming but following the story with normal attentiveness, when suddenly I was struck with terrific force by a realization. … I had lost it, and now in a grownup Glade, the biggest jungle on earth, it had returned. The mysteries of jungle life, the ways of its animals and plants, its dramatic storms and sunsets, its snakes, its orchids, its fascinating virginity, the hardness of making one’s way in it, and the generosity of beauty all made it appear even more actively and profoundly right. It was rightness on a grand scale.
It was The Glade, lost, found, and now recognized, this time forever. Around me, overhead, underfoot, everything was right, being born, living, dying and being replaced without a break in the order of it all.
I ran my hands lovingly over the great roots that held me like an armchair, and began to entertain the idea of staying in the jungle for the rest of my life.2
This rediscovery set her on a very different path from the one she had been raised to follow. After five expeditions into the South American jungle and more than two years living with Stone Age communities there, she wrote a book about her experiences, The Continuum Concept: Allowing Human Nature to Work Successfully, a much-praised and -translated work from which all the quotations above were taken. As part of lecturing, writing, and working individually with people as a psychotherapist, her personal experience has created her life’s mission: helping people bridge a “normal” distance from nature and arrive at what she sees as the evolutionary source of human well-being.*
Jean Liedloff’s story is only a more dramatic version of one told by many people who link the loss of a true self to a loss of the natural world. In women, this seems to happen most often at adolescence. Just as boys are growing into more freedom, girls are growing into less: they are encouraged to put their “center” into other people. Even dressing and behaving in a “feminine” way create a barrier with the natural world, for nature and artifice don’t mix well.
As a result, many women who have given away too much of themselves often talk of recovering their losses by returning to a particular garden, a tree house, a mountain path, a lake—anything that was part of their earlier freedom. At Black Lake, Michigan, during a women’s weekend at the United Auto Workers’ education center, for instance, I talked with factory workers who said those few days in nature allowed them to recover a lost identity in a way that just meeting each other in barren rooms never had. As one woman put it, “It’s like going back to the days when we skinny-dipped in quarries and never gave a thought to how we looked.” Outward Bound and other wilderness groups help both men and women gain self-confidence, but they are often an especially dramatic turning point for women and girls who have been discouraged from such freedom and exploring. There are even special wilderness weekends for women who are recovering from breast cancer and what may feel like body betrayal, or the loss of identity that can come with divorce. There is a reason why these groups are effective in nature.
In industrialized countries, many women are trying to bring nature back into their daily lives by buying land and restoring its natural state, building wilderness cabins, and organizing their own nature expeditions: a little-publicized part of the women’s movement. In agricultural countries, women are rebelling on behalf of nature. A case in point is the Chipko movement that began in the Himalayan foothills twenty years ago when women literally hugged local village trees (chipko means “to embrace”) in order to save them from the ax—and started a contagion of direct action that has spread to many other countries.3
This positive use by women of what in the past was used against us—a closeness to nature—has given birth to a new term: ecofeminism. There is now a body of theory and groups in almost every country that see the relationship of humans to nature as the paradigm for our relationships to each other, and also equate our view of nature with our view of the inner self.
It will take a long time to undo the hostile relationship that is implicit in everything from pollution to such rites as fraternity hazings that require conquering a symbolic wilderness, or Lyndon Johnson shooting game from the window of an air-conditioned limousine. But there needn’t be a trip to Brazil or an ecology demonstration to help us make this connection to nature. The greatest testimony to its power is the strength to be found in its most modest outcroppings available to us all.
Even on my crowded block in New York City, I see clues to the saving grace of nature. In the last month or so I have observed:
In fact, many people can vouch for the increased sense of well-being that comes from living around plants—even if it’s only a houseplant or two. Invalids, prisoners, and older people have all been found to gain peace of mind, sometimes even lowered blood pressure and better health, from having the opportunity to care for plants in their rooms. And gardeners work to create havens on rooftops and vacant lots in every city. Robin Morgan, poet, international activist, and inveterate creator of urban rooftop gardens, explained to me why she carries pots and dirt up and down her narrow apartment stairs to create the island of green and growing things celebrated in the title of her poetry collection Upstairs in the Garden. “Growing anything gives you the most disproportionate pleasure for your efforts. It’s the best evidence of life’s infinite durability and regeneration—on all counts, the surest source of faith in oneself.”
Few modern writers have evoked the life-transforming powers of nature as vividly as Diane Ackerman, a naturalist, explorer, poet, and self-described “earth-ecstatic.” In A Natural History of the Senses, she describes the “visual opium” of watching the sun go down through a picture window: “Each night the sunset surged with purple pampas-grass plumes, and shot fuchsia rockets into the pink sky, then deepened through folded layers of peacock green to all the blues of India and a black across which clouds sometimes churned like alabaster dolls.”4
Seeing—really seeing—this incredible display also gave her a sense of proportion that comes from an awareness of life’s cycles. “When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame,” she wrote,
then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life’s many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are. It probably doesn’t matter if … a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our senses like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move.5