A photo of the top of our valley
Being, working and living outside 14+ hours a day has made a huge impact on me these last few weeks. It sounds cliché, but it’s true: nature is healing.
If you gravitate towards nature—which those reading this blog likely do—you know what I mean. The longer you spend in nature, the more it brings you in contact with yourself, helping you remove the tight masks society demands you wear. What remains is that raw self, a nameless thing that is simply thrilled just to be.
For those who don’t get it, seeing nature as dull or lacking the screaming attractions of the digital world, this blog entry is mostly for you. Most things that are transformative are subtle and well, city life, with all its diversions, tensions, and competition (for jobs, houses, spouses, etc.), is in your face.
In cities, our brains are constantly engaged. The myriad of details we have to deal with can become a blur as we hurriedly multitask, making us forgetful of what we have just seen, done or said (or in my case, what I just ate for lunch!) Most of us are pulled in too many directions, having to balance our attention with the overload of information we receive.
When we venture into the countryside, we bring the city with us. I was talking to a friend volunteering for a men’s retreat (also in Portugal) and she was telling me about how many of the participants needed time adjusting to being outside. At first, many acted like they were visiting a park: walking around, getting the layout of the land, and actively looking for something to do. The longer they stayed, the more they sank into the slowness of things, doing something close to nothing or falling asleep on a hammock.
A few days ago, I read an article about nature deficit, an odd term coined by Richard Louv, co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Children & Nature Network. Louv uses it to illustrate how 21st century homo digitalis has become alienated from nature—what most natural, nature itself, is something alien to many of us.
Due to our urbanised and digitised lifestyles, most people (but the young especially) are spending less times than ever outdoors, leading to increased mental anxiety, sadness and suicidal thoughts. Being outside is so important to humans, in the USA prisoners are legally guaranteed 2 hrs a day outside—yet a survey shows 50% of children aren’t even spending that! Just as bad, the average American spends 93% of their time indoors, and ten hours a day on social media. They don’t even get that much sleep…
As technology continues to take hold, we’ve started ignoring the world our ancestors spent their time in (and where the majority of things in human history happened), in favour of the virtual world displayed from our screens.
It’s stupid having to remind ourselves that nature is good for us. What was once an intuitive thing needs a rational explanation in step with our efficient, capable and pragmatic city frame of mind. Luckily, science backs me up. The more we interact with nature, the more we relax, engage and pay attention. Nature makes us happier, more creative, kinder to each other and we bounce back from stress more easily, too. In a lab experiment by Roger Ulrich of Texas A&M University and colleagues, participants who first viewed a stress-inducing movie, and were then exposed to videotapes with natural scenes, showed much quicker recovery from stress than those who’d been exposed to ones of urban settings.
For me, being in nature is healing because it is peaceful, making me slow down enough to absorb my environment. Connecting to it (for its enormous) happens in small moments. Like dipping naked into the river, watching small fish nibble at my legs; seeing a silk blue-coloured dragonfly hover over our landscape; or watching how the light filters through the trees in the late afternoon, painting the landscape like Monet would.
All this excites me on the deepest level. I am blown away by nature’s rough beauty, its fierce intelligence, the complex, masterful symbiosis of elements, and its undeterred, jaw-dropping creativity. Being able to observe it all and digest life--this is what I call healing!
Yes "Nature Immersion" sounds blissful :-)