Our spring retreat went beautifully. It felt good to gather in a big circle and affirm our shared desire for reconnection. We even braved the cold rain and spent some time with the grand cottonwoods at Harbert Forest, who had lots to tell us. At the end, there was general agreement that spending time with other humans, especially in a yoga context, is really quite a lovely thing to do. We’ve already scheduled another retreat for the fall: October 1 at the Heartwood Center.
One moment from our time in the woods has stayed with me. A participant shared that at first she saw all the tree trunks as the same, boring grey. Then, after I invited folks to slow down and look with more curiosity, she discovered that tree bark in fact contains a muted riot of color and fractal ingress.
And isn’t this true of most things we pass by? Our brain offers us a rough sketch of what’s probably there, based on past experience. Caught up in our hustle towards some better future, we mistake these energy-saving approxations as what’s “really there”, and the world starts to feel dull and boring, like we’re walking around the low-res slums of the Metaverse.
One of the central features of my nature yoga classes is the Sit Spot, which goes: find an outdoor place that beckons, settle into stillness, and pay attention steadily for a long while. It’s an eyes open meditation, an offering of mindful and reverent attention to the outer world rather than our inner landscape. A very common experience is the “slow reveal”. Initially, I may only notice a few interesting features - perhaps a branch hanging at a jaunty angle. I may get a little bored, think about checking my phone. Then suddenly: a tiny sapling appears right next to me, green shimmering against mottled grey leaves.
It was there the whole time, yet my brain has only just now managed to overcome its assumptions about what is there and REALLY SEE. The longer I sit, the more emerges to be known in its miraculous particularity. There is a tiny bit of moss at the base of the sapling, ants travel by, the temperature is cooler near the ground.
My teacher Micah Mortali speaks of time in nature as “looking into the green mirror”. Unlike the black mirror of this device upon which I write these words, which can only show me the fruits of human artifice, the green mirror reveals the More Than Human world which includes me but also, mercifully and terrifyingly, exceeds me.
The green mirror can show me many things, depending on my intentions and the whims of the local spirits. Sometimes I only see myself and my human concerns, like Narcissus seeing only his reflection, never the fish swimming below. Sometimes I see the way my own concerns - which feel so unique and personal - are in fact instances of much larger patterns. More than seeing, I touch and smell the crumbling decay of a tree trunk which harbors new grow in its hollows - a reminder that my own aging and death are natural and, even, needed.
Yet other times, I am left wordless in wonder, humbled in the presence of elemental forces far older than me and my upstart species. This is often when my ego gets a bit restless and nervous. What does my fleeting human life matter the sky? All my attempts to “sum up” what I see in the mirror are incomplete, ill-fitting.
I am reminded again of the Mary Oliver poem “The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water”, which I included in a past essay:
And there you are on the shore, fitful and thoughtful, trying to attach them to an idea— some news of your own life. But the lilies are slippery and wild—they are devoid of meaning, they are simply doing, from the deepest spurs of their being, what they are impelled to do every summer. And so, dear sorrow, are you.
That the new lilies are “devoid of meaning” is, perhaps, to say that they feel no compulsion to oblige the narrator’s desire for them to signify something to her. Their slippery surface will not allow any projections of personal meaning to fully adhere1. If I strain to see myself in the green mirror, at least in human form, I find myself frustrated. But if I can relax my fixated stare for long enough, and cease my search for neat conceptual bowties, I begin to recognize a different self that is completely intertwined with the growing, growling world.
There is much to gain from this recognition. The psychic cost of holding ourselves separate from the living world is high and leads to psychotic behavior, which is everywhere in evidence. It can be a great relief to acknowledge that we are creatures of the earth, with soft animal bodies that simply and insistently “love what they love” (and hate what they hate). The harsh winds of self-judgment can’t blow us over so easily when the self becomes more dispersed across the landscape.
There is also much to lose. The modern self is constructed on a foundation of separateness, not just between humans and nature, but mind and body, thinking and feeling. To gaze into the green mirror risks all of these binaries2. “There are more things in heaven and earth / than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” says Hamlet, a highly-educated prince visited by a ghost. The Fertile Unknown vastly exceeds what can be captured in language or thought or equation. The mystics consistently report that this is actually really good news, but it feels quite threatening to the ego - a mental faculty devoted to the survival of one separate, individual organism.
On balance, I think we must take the risk of stepping off the pedestal and rejoining our More Than Human kin. I will close by quoting again a central passage from David Abram’s masterpiece Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, which I return to again and again as I think about these questions:
We may, of course, continue to speak of mind as an excellence utterly unique to our species, a capacity that springs us free from our embedment in the earthly community of animate forms. We may continue to hold that the rustling of experience—of exultation and grief, of compassion and confusion—is a purely human thing, and hence that the felt stirrings undergone by other creatures are mute and expressionless phantoms, automatic reflexes entirely closed to creative nuance…
But by doing so, we seal ourselves into a numbing solitude— a loneliness already settling around us as the complex creativity of forests gives way to the numbered productivity of even-aged tree farms, as the diverse riffs of songbirds steadily fade from the soundscape, and the wild, syncopated chant of the frog chorus that once rocked the fields every spring dwindles down to the monotonous hum of a single street lamp. Do we really believe that the human imagination can sustain itself without being startled by other shapes of sentience—by redwoods and gleaming orchids and the eerie glissando cries of humpback whales? Do we really trust that the human mind can maintain its coherence in an exclusively human-made world?
I am indeed worried about the coherence of the human mind in my community and the larger human family. Amidst unprecedented material abundance, safety and comfort, we are growing deranged. Why? Is the bill come due for our original sin of desiring Knowledge of Good and Evil? Are we parasitic on the Earth, destroying our host with our endless appetite? Abram’s offers an alternative story, placing our predicament in an earthly cosmology in which we may yet play a noble role:
Perhaps the broad sphere, itself, needed our forgetfulness. Perhaps some new power was waiting to be born on the planet, and our species was called upon to incubate this power in the dark cocoon of our solitude. Our senses dulled, our attention lost to the world, we created, in our inward turning, a quiet cave wherein a new layer of Earth could first shape itself and come to life. But surely it’s time now to hatch this new stratum, to waken our senses from their screen-dazzled swoon, and so to offer this power back to the more-than-human terrain… to cough up this difficult magic that’s been growing within us, swelling us with pride even as the land disintegrates all around us. Surely we've cut ourselves off for long enough—time, now, to open our minds outward, returning to the biosphere that wide intelligence we'd thought was ours alone.
I like this so much, because it places our delusions of separateness within the larger activity of the Earth. We are not evil aliens despoiling a virgin planet. Humans, all our follies and all our triumphs, are something the Earth is doing. This doesn’t erase questions of moral responsibility, but it does highlight how remarkable it is that we debate ethics at all. We may be the only animals that wage wars, but we are also - as far as we know - the only ones that campaign for peace as well.
More from me on this theme
Let’s look in the mirror together
This Friday, May 5, I am relaunching my weekly nature yoga classes at Harbert Park.
Physical yoga is a potent way to rediscover the forgotten pleasures and powers of the human body. In a similar way, we can practice nature yoga to consciously reconnect with the wonder and beauty of the living world. Rather than using the outdoors merely as a pleasant backdrop for our postures, we can practice relating directly with the More Than Human realm through playful exploration, group process and silent meditation.
Each session starts with simple warm-ups and breathing practices to get the body awake and attuned. Then a slow, mindful walk through a local forest or park, with lots of time to explore with all of the senses (well, maybe not taste). There is time for seated meditation, and finally a group sharing of insights. This is tremendously satisfying and healing work, especially in our age of digital disembodiment. Learn more here.
As an aside, I would argue that lilies nevertheless are engaging in a kind of signification, as flowers are essentially rhetorical devices, evolved to convince insects to help them with reproduction. They are speaking, in a very old way, but just not to us! Richard Doyle traces the origins of “convincing” back to flowering plants, among other psychedelic insights, in his book Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants and the Evolution of the Noosphere.
Perhaps one day the identity of "nonbinary” will become more ambitious than just transcending gender norms…
Nick, you describe the duality of our world so eloquently and yet so simply. I love to read your thoughts. I feel randomly (or not so randomly) fortunate to have crossed life paths with you and Lela. I consider your acquaintance a special gift. I look forward to you continuing this work.