Becoming Nature
I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown,
for going out, I found, was really going in.119
~john muir
Before settlers arrived, the land where I currently live in southern California had been stewarded by native Chumash peoples for over ten thousand years. At a city council meeting in late summer of 2019, Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, a Chumash elder in my community, spoke about the festival called Hutash (also the name for Mother Earth), which was underway. Hutash coincides with the transition from summer into autumn and is the Chumash time of thanksgiving, during which they appreciate the Earth and animals through song and dance. Elders are reminded to honor the children and children to remember their elders. As Mrs. Tumamait-Stenslie shared, I sat in my seat realizing how sane such a festival is compared to the business-as-usual dealings at typical city council meetings, and the bloody heritage Americans celebrate during Thanksgiving.120
Insulated in cities, picking fruits and vegetables from supermarket shelves instead of from trees and vines, turning on the river from the tap at our sinks, and never having to set foot on rocky ground unless we choose to—modernity affords a dazzling array of dangerously seductive conveniences. While these luxuries arguably increase our “quality of life,” they deny us a direct connection with the source from which our lives derive and are sustained. Without an integral bond with the natural world, we embody less of the ineffable simplicity we need to truly thrive. We walk through life essentially impoverished, with an attenuated capacity to respect and preserve the natural world.
Cities contain and represent what is most imbalanced about us. They reflect back to us the contents of our own minds, trapping us in our neuroses. In contrast, being in nature fills us with primordial images and information we have evolved with for millennia, including the bounty of other life forms with which we share the planet, and need to survive. The disconnected soul and anti-Earth worldview of modern living is another hidden, root cause of climate crisis. Add social media and technological addiction, and we brew a perfect storm for continued disease-making. On a recent walk, I suddenly realized the liability of living in a modern city during these relatively early stages of climate collapse. Being dependent on ease and convenience is not how I’ve lived for the last twenty years. But it is now, and it doesn’t seem to be good preparation for harder times.
Raiding the Pantry
Enlightenment zealots such as Harvard professor Steven Pinker laud how well-off we are now compared to our supposed “brutal savage” past,121 while seeming to ignore the technological arc that has destroyed so much (in but a nanosecond in planetary history) at the expense of the vastness of all other life. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges astutely observes, “What are demagogues like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, positive psychologists and Candide-like prognosticators such as Steven Pinker, other than charlatans who insist the problem facing us is not real?” 122 We would be wise to instead abide Jung’s prescient warning: “Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.” 123 Indeed, we have mined and looted the Earth for temporary abundance. The honeymoon is over.
Raiding the kitchen pantry for a feast might look like prosperity. But how much is left in the cupboard for future meals? At first blush, even as we’ve pushed much of our pollution out of sight, it would seem we’re succeeding—until we wake up and look around. No glory attained by burning fossil fuels is worth catalyzing the sixth mass extinction and driving our own species to the same brink. Welcome to the age of climate chaos, of hubristically plundering the pantry for excess outer abundance and inner, psycho-spiritual poverty.
When progress leads us to the cliff’s edge, we must question the worth of our innovations. Digital devices and apps, for example, are purposefully engineered to hack our brains, colonize our attention, and endlessly trigger our neurological reward centers to crave more.124 As engines of addiction and distraction, they are therefore not morally neutral. In their thrall, we become ever less able to attune to the needs and conditions of our surroundings and refrain from consuming and polluting. To heal this rift, we must return to the wisdom of our bodies, and sensitize ourselves to the natural world and to intimate, in-person relationships. This way, we access and enact our deeper, innate caring that lies buried beneath pain and addiction.
Body-centered, Earth-based wisdom is an amalgam of knowledge and passion born of heart and mind in vital union. Unfortunately, this practice, and sensitizing to nature, are disparaged by popular culture. To address the disease of our times we must tap our deepest medicine: the repudiation of superfluous distraction in favor of dedicating ourselves to cultivating a rich inner life and restoring the biosphere. This isn’t as easy as it might seem because, in addition to making “sacrifices” to free up time, degrowth requires feeling and facing our fears and pain. Resisting the commodification of our hearts is essential because when our hearts are owned by corruption—whether by old hurts causing us to hurt others, or too many gadgets distracting us from nourishing relationships—we quickly and pervasively corrupt the world.
We must resist modernity’s excesses and ensuing apathy, and be able to choose we instead of me. A sense of we mitigates our propensity for greed and for acting on irrational fears of separation (as we will explore in the next section). This requires emotional humility, often forged in earnest via heartbreak and an embodied connection to nature. I’m not proposing a return to hunter-gatherer ways, but enough contact with nature to keep this relationship vital, to fuel our efforts to care enough for the natural world and each other’s hearts, and thereby curtail the climate changes we’ve caused.
A Famous Backpacking Trip
In a poem titled, “The City of My Mountain,” I write: “Yet, there is no law/ that requires the people/ to visit the mountain/ even once a week/ nor should there be.” A requirement to visit the mountain would diminish inspiration gained from the journey, the original purpose for the sojourn. If we were more nature-centric, we would be motivated by an innate, soulful pull to visit the mountains and other sacred nature spots. Such in vivo relationships have informed indigenous peoples’ bonds with nature for millennia. They remind us of our simple affinity with the more-than-human world, and require no religion or superstition.
Regular pilgrimages into nature are a vital component of global health and healing our climate crisis. It would be of incalculable benefit to require such immersions of presidents, legislators, and corporate leaders! Imagine a backpacking trip during which our politicians could sleep and dream with the Earth, sparking epiphanies for sensible regulation and business practices that honor an enlightened sense of we to include the Earth—if only! When I shared this uncanny idea with a friend, she told me, to my surprise, that such an escapade in fact took place.
In 1903, renowned naturalist John Muir took then-United States president Theodore Roosevelt on a three-day trek through Yosemite National Park, a place Muir had grown to love over decades. The beauty of Yosemite inspired Roosevelt to unprecedented political action to protect it, along with many other natural treasures. Following this epic jaunt, the president went on “to sign into existence five more national parks, eighteen national monuments, fifty-five national bird sanctuaries and wildlife refuges and one hundred fifty national forests.” 125 Nature itself, and the passion of a man in love with her, changed the heart and mind of a president whom we can thank for much of the protected wilderness we have today.
Industrialization disease perpetuates our separation from nature. In contrast, wilderness provides us with ineffable sanctuary for the Earth-centered, embodied spirituality we need to deliver us from our commodification of everything so we might survive into the future. To this end, in Our National Parks, Muir wrote: “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease.” 126
Ecocide: Deeper than Greed
Climate crisis is part of our larger war on nature. This ecocide includes pandemic polluting, objectifying and “resourcing” nature, factory farming, incessantly noxious machine noise, and cementing over the Earth. Many consider greed to be the root of this ecocide, yet I invite us to look deeper.
As our harbored emotional pain and disconnection from the natural world increase, so do our insulation and greed. The greedier we become, the more we destroy the biosphere. Greed is therefore a branch symptom of deeper relationship dynamics (with self and nature) that also becomes malicious in its own right. The less we experience nature, the more we divorce from the web of life and the richness of original beauty. Such fracture further increases our isolation, compulsive anthropocentricity, and greed. This self-reinforcing, downward spiral is a positive feedback loop that exponentially breeds disease as we persist in trying to fulfill our need for meaning and belonging in disastrous ways that cannot succeed—especially via excess consumerism.
Living apart from the natural world is akin to not having friends. In contrast, creating a relationship with nature enhances our lives and fortifies all three of our triangle of resilience relationships: not only the obvious connection with nature, but also our inner healing and our sense of community. Wilderness reminds us of reciprocity and the interdependence of death and rebirth, give and take, and our humble place amongst all things—the antithesis of greed and self-obsession. It places us directly in touch with the essentials for our survival and the sacredness of all life. Such encounters with nature leave us humbly awestruck and open our hearts to the marvel of creation and our place in the cosmos (Resource 3: “National Geographic”). The more we participate in this Earth-based spirituality, the more kindly we treat the world, and this in turn enhances our own lives, creating a healing positive feedback loop.
Perverse greed is a form of addiction that leads to ecocide. Depth psychologist Marion Woodman offers us insight into this dynamic: “I think we are acting like addicts. We have all this wonderful life, but we cannot believe we can lose it. That is too horrible a thought. So the fear is expressed in adding more and more stuff, stealing more and more from the Earth, and acting more and more irresponsible.” 127
Woodman also says, “In my work with addicts, I see again and again that the addict is trying to escape his own or her own humanity. It hates what it is to be human … wants to escape into some kind of transcendent reality.” 128 Like other addictions, greed is an attempt to rise above our humanness, to buffer and bypass its inherent pain. More than simply a vice, greed is better understood as a form of escape, a transcendence, which denies us a compassionate, embodied union with one another and the Earth. Working wisely with our emotional pain ushers us into our full humanity; succumbing to greed is a doomed strategy to fill our love-voids that result from a deficiency of human-to-human caring and humble belonging in the world. How can we feel fulfilled when pain blocks our hearts and the invisible ways of the natural world cannot fill us with awe and reverie?
Sacred Permission
Earning the right to significantly affect the world is the capstone to a threefold rite of passage I call sacred permission: its essence is engaging inner activism for inner sustainability and a rewilding that leads to outer regeneration and thriving. One facet of sacred permission is to substantially heal our core love wounds, as described in Chapter 6. Sacred permission is fleshed out, integrated, and expanded by establishing intimate connection with the natural world and with human community. All three processes can happen simultaneously and interdependently. In essence, sacred permission is the process of becoming an elder.
Of course, emotional healing does not exist in a vacuum, and requires a measure of reciprocity with nature and fellow humans to support this “personal” work. Once we heal the bulk of our backlogged pain, however, we become more emotionally available to build even deeper, more meaningful relationships with others, including the Earth. This intimacy of inter-being in turn leads to more personal healing. Notice, these three facets of healing (self, nature, and our fellow humans) comprise our triangle of resilience relationships. Transformational healing via sacred permission, which moves organically from inside us into the world, is captured in the term becoming medicine for our times.
Traditionally, teenage rites of passage mark the leaving behind of childhood and the initiation into adulthood. They entail a sacred journey and that often includes a brush with death, during which adolescents must dig down deep and find a power and endurance they didn’t know they possessed. Initiatory encounters with death typically occur in the natural world and include interactions with nonhuman beings. The rites are both physically and emotionally challenging and the participants are well-supported by the tribe. Such controlled trauma creates a bond with the internal and external forces one wrestles with and survives, thus consecrating intimacy and a sense of power. The result is adult fortitude, especially psychological resilience, wherein children cease to be nourished only by elders but learn to provide for and protect themselves and their community.
In the hunter-gatherer Dakota culture, for example, “a boy spends several days naked, vulnerable, and fasting as he awaits the arrival of animal-spirit allies who might help him to develop and actualize his understanding of the spiritual and ecological unity of nature.” 129 In Vanuatu, a small island nation in the middle of the South Pacific, “young boys come of age by jumping off of a ninety-eight-foot-tall tower with a bungee-like vine tied to their ankles, just barely preventing them from hitting the ground. The catch? Unlike a bungee cord, the vine lacks elasticity, and a slight miscalculation in vine length could lead to broken bones or even death.” 130 In many traditional societies, the purpose of initiation rites was to transform the consciousness of the initiate from “an egocentric to an altruistic, ecological self-image.” 131 So crucial is the result of this encounter with death for the greater good that traditional cultures mandate it. While today it’s unrealistic to engage in such harrowing rites, we must find creative, even unorthodox, ways to initiate and move from human anthropocentrism to eco-centrism.
When we suffer emotional trauma in childhood, part of our psyche remains stuck at that stage of development—thus the term “developmental trauma.” Most of us were not supported through this trauma as the initiates of traditional rites of passage were. We discover our initiation later in life, should we choose to revisit and work through our pain, initiate the developmentally frozen parts of us, and free ourselves to “grow up” from the inside out. This healing passage preserves our childlike nature (vitality, innocence, liberation, and care) and transforms what is childish and wounded (entitlement, false ego/persona, constant need for fun). Such healing paradoxically allows us to move into responsible adulthood, where fun is a slice of the pie, not the entire goal. Ironically, as responsible adults tending to our healing, we seem to encounter a preponderance of childish adults who condemn us for focusing on healing our tender hearts.
Grieving our core love wounds is a modern version of traditional initiation rites, a dark night of the soul during which we die to and through our pain. It is not a brush with literal death but can feel like one. It is an immersion into psychological death and eventual rebirth, a comprehensive and potent initiation into adulthood that emblazons in our heart-minds many of the core qualities needed to be responsible and caring. During this work of mourning and healing our large “T” and small “t” traumas, we transform (or better, are transformed by) what has kept us frozen in psycho-spiritual mediocrity. The qualities forged in us through sacred permission are none other than our finer jewels of being human.
Unlike in traditional rites of passage, nature connection is not absolutely essential for the modern dark night of the soul. Yet many who undertake this odyssey to heal emotional wounds, including me, find great refuge and support being in nature. This is why sacred permission is not onefold but threefold, and nurturing a relationship with the natural world and one’s community—during and especially after emotional work—ensures this growth work is robust and sustainable.
We can be kind to others and work to heal the world without passing through the rite of sacred permission. But love as just a feeling or mustered compassion—as the care we already have in hand prior to dark-night-of-the-soul work—is helpful, but not enough. If it were, we would not be where we are today. We must resurrect more embodied and integrated love, mined from our pain and denial, what Jung described as making the unconscious (dark) and conscious (light). To become more deeply loving, more genuinely compassionate, more sustainably helpful and giving, we use the love we already feel and turn it toward the places that hurt inside—the places of unrequited love.
Sacred permission allows us to do much greater good, because by transforming our darkness of backlogged pain we augment the love we already have in hand. We liberate and bolster our finer jewels that have been sequestered by our shadow pain. Sacred permission is a comprehensive, integrated, embodied path for being more loving, not just for superficially mustering care. The latter is less effective because, when push comes to shove, our shadow pain raises its ugly head to sabotage our best intentions.
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Certainly, our would-be leaders and elected officials need as much sacred permission as possible. If we required of them a modicum of emotional intelligence, nature-connection, and experience with caring community before taking office, I imagine they would think and act differently on behalf of the greater good they purportedly represent. But leaders with the green heart of Roosevelt are rare, and most who create our laws today don’t care enough for us and the more-than-human world. This missing compassion is what social scientist and activist Kenneth Clark means when he suggests “people in power should all be required to take an ‘empathy pill.’ ” 132 If only it were such a quick fix! The issue is not only greed but a lack of sacred permission.
Pain-driven, nature-divorced greed and ignorance are also exacerbated by the quick fix, “me” mentality promulgated by modern culture. Inner activism initiates us into the deep process of sacred permission, frees up our hearts, and liberates our ability to act on behalf of the greater good. Simultaneously, spending time in nature sensitizes and inspires us, supporting inner work and our connection with others. Being able to change our ways requires taking an honest look at ourselves and surrendering to be transformed by our long-held personal and generational pain with humility and honesty. Once sufficiently initiated, we can deeply extend this courage, humility, and care to the natural world and other humans. We gain the heart-mind bandwidth to treat everything more kindly and employ innovation wisely for the betterment of all. This is being comprehensively compassionate.
• Exercise •
Chapter 8 Journaling and Field Trip
Take out your journal or notepad, place it in front of you, and write down your responses to items one, two, and four.
1. What is your favorite nature spot near you? What qualities make it special for you?
2. Can you identify a time in your life that qualified as a rite of passage into adulthood via the process of sacred permission as described in this chapter? How long did it last, or has it lasted? How did it change your relationship with yourself and with the world? What gifts and resources, if any, have you harvested from it?
3. Field Trip: Find a quiet place in nature, sit or lie down, and close your eyes. Feel the Earth beneath you. Then, one by one, and for as long as you like:
• Tune into the sounds around you. Allow them to become you, so the sounds are you, as one with your body, existing within or emanating from your body. Rest in this oneness.
• Tune into the scents around you. Notice the aroma of the Earth: any sand, soil, plants, water, flowers, trees, grasses, or other natural things. If pleasing to you, allow these scents to become part of you, so your being becomes infused with their scents. Rest in this oneness.
• With your eyes open, notice the elements of nature you just listened to and smelled. Notice their color, texture, distance from you, and their unique qualities. Allow yourself to be with them.
4. What part of this chapter spoke to you most poignantly and why? What internal changes or external actions does it inspire or catalyze in you?
119. Wood, “Quotations from John Muir.”
120. Cain, “The True Story Behind Thanksgiving Is a Bloody Struggle That Decimated the Population and Ended with a Head on a Stick.”
121. Survival International, “Survival Condemns Steven Pinker’s ‘Brutal Savage’ Myth.”
122. Hedges, “The Last Act of the Human Comedy.”
123. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, 110.
124. 60 Minutes, “Brain Hacking: Silicon Valley Is Engineering Your Phone, Apps and Social Media to Get You Hooked, Says a Former Google Product Manager.”
125. MacGillivray, “The Camping Trip that Changed the Nation.”
126. Wood, “Quotations from John Muir.”
127. “The Addicted World” clip from “Marion Woodman: Dancing in the Flames.”
128. Horváth, “Marion Woodman: Holding the Tension of the Opposites.”
129. Paddon, “The Earth Wisdom of Male Initiation.”
130. Nuñez and Pfeffer, “13 Amazing Coming of Age Traditions From Around the World.”
131. Paddon, “The Earth Wisdom of Male Initiation.”
132. Rosin, “The End Of Empathy.”