– No Greater Time Than Now
(excerpted from The Nature Embedded Mind: How The Way We Think Can Heal Our Planet and Ourselves by Julie Brams)
What do you notice about yourself when you lie down in the grass and gaze up at the clouds? What do you notice when you gaze into a shadowy pond long enough to discover a fish slowly moving toward you? When the sound of rustling leaves reveals a small bird nearby? What do you feel like when you sit on a boulder at the top of a mountain trail and look out at the silent trees below you? When you’re brushing your dog’s fur and you notice a look in his eye that you recognize as gratitude and love? What do you experience when you notice the grass in your yard is struggling in the summer heat? What do you feel when that same grass is growing lush again after you’ve given it more water? What happens inside you when you’re walking alone in the winter woods and stop to feel the snow silently gathering on and around you? Who are you in these moments? How do you experience yourself and the world when you’re in intimate connection with Nature?
That you, is you in your natural consciousness, a nature embedded mind. The one you were born with.
Our knowledge about the benefits of being in nature is growing daily.
Human-Nature connection plays a significant role in our health, the health of our planet, and our ability to return to a sustainable culture where humans live in balance with the rest of nature. This sustainable culture is a nature embedded way of life that stems from a nature embedded mind. This way of thinking and behaving is best exemplified by our Indigenous ancestors and our current Indigenous contemporaries. However, it’s also a way of life that has no racial identity and is the natural birthright of all human beings. We are all born from Earth, and we all have the capacity to live in connection with Earth. The key to whether we do or not and to what degree we do, hinges on one simple premise in our own thinking. That premise is: I am embodied and embedded within all elements of Earth. In other words, my body is part of and connected to all the other parts of one living interdependent being named Earth.
My hope is that this book serves as an invitation for all of us to begin an important discussion together about humans and nature, about the human mind and how it affects human behavior, about the nature of humans perhaps forgotten, and about the reclamation of our place in the natural world as a pathway to our well-being.
I’m proposing and inviting you to join me in a significant shift in consciousness from where we are now regarding our place in nature. Yet at the same time, it’s a former consciousness all our ancestors held to be true not that long ago. And it’s the consciousness each of us is born with and still have.
You yourself may be beginning to make this shift in your consciousness.
Or you may have made this shift and are now living in a consciousness where you are in respectful reciprocal relationships with the other-than-human beings around you and perceive yourself as nature. You may already be experiencing the changes that accompany that perspective.
Another category you may notice (or be part of) is the growing number of people who can sense some kind of mental shift is needed, but not having the guidance or permission to turn to other forms of nature as equally intelligent beings, are left feeling immense fear, agitation, depression, and hopelessness about humanity and about the future of our existence.
Current scientific research shows, without a doubt, that humans are optimized in nature both physically and mentally. Studies that originated in the 1980s in Japan have now been replicated and advanced globally.
Research on human health benefits associated with non-goal directed time immersed in nature shows a measurable positive effect on the immune system, cardiovascular system, stress hormones, and lifestyle diseases such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer. Studies also find measurable psychological benefits such as stress resiliency, attention restoration, increased compassion, empathy, and creativity, and decreases in anxiety and depression. These measurable effects are encouraging and oftentimes may be the gateway for people to re-engage with nature in a meaningful way. However, it all too often stops short of the perceptual shift that we need now. Therefore, we will also look deeper into the change in consciousness we need in addition to just spending time in nature and how to reclaim our original, nature embedded consciousness easily and effortlessly.
It takes a huge act of courage to go against our collective consciousness and risk being ostracized. Science is beginning to give us the permission and courage to think differently from what we’ve been taught, without risking alienation from our human herd. But science is only the beginning.
With science giving us the reason why, the next step is to look at our own thinking and the actions that follow our thinking. It’s only through re-engaging an intimate personal relationship with the nature around us that we can fully participate as equal members of our planetary community.
Conversely to Hansel and Gretel who left breadcrumbs to find their way out of the woods, we find ourselves now stranded in our civilized, industrialized, digitized cage and needing to find the trail back into our Wilderness.
The good news is that unlike Hansel and Gretel, the trail is permanently marked, doesn’t disappear, cannot be destroyed, and is with you all the time. The trail back into connection with the rest of nature is your birthright. It is your own nature. Spending time in sensory connection with the rest of nature with no agenda other than to connect with the other beings, is that trail.
There has been no greater time in history than now to confront the faulty premise that humans are something other than and outside of the rest of nature. It’s my hope that this book will allow us to explore and wonder about this premise, how it may operate in our perception of ourselves and nature, and perhaps recognize what behaviors might change as our perceptions expand. In this way, we can heal. And in our healing, we have a chance and opportunity to return to a sustainable way of living in our planet, not on it.
