Reconnect With Nature Blog

Wild Hearts, Free Spirits

Note from Con Slobodchikoff: This is a post by guest author Randall Johnson, who has been a frequent commentator on this blog, as well as a frequent guest author and commentator on the Dog Behavior Blog.

Finding a way to reconnect with nature can take place on a grand scale by walking through a tropical rainforest and feeling, rather than seeing, the immense variety of life it supports, swimming with free-ranging dolphins, or, say, coming face-to-face with a great whale. However, more often than not, it’s the everyday, seemingly mundane, events happening around us that have the power to call us back from our artificial steel-and-concrete world and ‘ground’ us, as it were, in the natural world.

A few years back, my wife and I bought a weekend / vacation home in her hometown, Lagoa da Prata, a small town in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.  At the time, we were living in Belo Horizonte, the state capital, working as teachers and translators and coping with the all the stress that goes along with big city life.

The house was part of a new development on a large tract of land that used to be part of the town’s biggest dairy farm and the setting clearly reflected its past: a long stretch of dirt road ran in front of the house led to the colonial-style farm house and then into a patch of dense forest. On one side of the road, there was a wide expanse of open meadow and on the other side, behind the house, a huge fenced-in cow pasture.

 Shortly after buying the house, we were ‘adopted’ by a scrawny little street dog with short dull gray fur that my wife decided to call Suzie. Following a couple of days of eating kibble and drinking fresh water, Suzie  underwent an amazing transformation:  her gray fur was replaced by a glossy, uniformly black coat.  (She was later identified by a friend of mine as a miniature pinscher, although with a non-standard color pattern.)

We soon discovered Suzie had a friend—a short scruffy male who looked a bit like Toto from The Wizard of Oz , except his fur was dirty-white. After trying several names, including Toto, we settled on Toby.  Unlike Suzie, though, Toby showed no interest in being adopted.  He hung out with us while we were at the house and we gave him food and water.  Sometimes, he took an afternoon nap inside the house, but he rarely slept there at night.

Anyway, my wife and I got into the routine of taking a walk down the dirt road early in the morning and again in the evening, right before sunset. Suzie and Toby invariably accompanied us.  

As we strolled along, I watched Suzie and Toby as they ran through meadow, Suzie leaping through the tall grass like a gazelle. Toby was less graceful, but he kept up as they chased after butterflies and small birds. Sometimes it looked as they were running for the sheer joy of it.  Once in while, they teamed up to harass the cows on the other side of the road, yapping and lunging at them, and then they’d take off again. It looked like a pleasant diversion (from their perspective, not from the cows’), maybe even a kind of adrenalin rush, because if a bull happened to be nearby, he wouldn’t hesitate to charge after them.

These were moments of boundless exhilaration. They were being themselves, having fun, unfettered by other worries or concerns, enjoying the “here and now”, which is something we 21^st century humans often have trouble doing, even in small, rural towns. They were wild hearts and free spirits, very much part of the world we share together, but more viscerally attuned to it.  

Walking down that country road was one way of seeking a reconnection with nature, but the active ingredient, the ‘bridge’ that made the connection real, was watching Suzie and Toby’s innocent, high-spirited capers as they gave me a glimpse of a purer, more primal connection that I myself cannot feel with the same intensity. Still, occasional glimpses have been enough to keep me grounded, and by reminding us that we are, first and foremost, products of the natural world, our companion animals may yet have another useful service to offer us.

--Randall Johnson

 

Watching Harry Potter Is Like Watching Paint Dry

Last night I went to see Harry Potter and found the movie to be completely boring. I had read Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince when it came out in 2006, so I had some idea of the story. A couple of friends who came with me to the theater had never read the book, found themselves clueless, and left half-way through (perhaps that’s where the Half comes in).

Even though I knew the general story line, I found the progression of the scenes to be tedious. I guess I expect a movie to actually have a story that takes the viewer through from beginning to end, and not just a collection of scenes that are a trip down memory lane.

Even with knowing the general story, I found it hard to figure out why one scene followed another. Gone was the richness of plot found in the original book. Gone were some of the interesting characters. Gone was a sense of action and vitality.

But since this is a blog about reconnecting with nature, I started to think about the parallel between this film and watching nature. For some, watching nature can be excruciatingly boring. For others, it can be very exciting. Same thing with the Potter film.

So why is watching nature really exciting for me, while watching Potter was extremely boring?

My answer is simple. In my opinion, movies are supposed to have a story. I don’t go to movies to watch a bunch of unconnected scenes that flash across the screen. I expect to have an organized plot, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that resolves the problem or situation posed at the beginning.

Watching nature is completely different. There is no plot that we can see. There may be a beginning, a middle, and an end, but we don’t know what it is. There may be a plot, but again we have no idea what it is.

Animal and plant lives are shrouded in mystery. Same for the weather. Same for the earth. We can describe animal and plant species and identify them by name, and we can describe ecological, geological, and climatological processes, but that doesn’t always give us a complete picture of what is happening around us as we sit and watch nature at work.

I know nothing about the bee that comes to collect pollen from a flower. Yes, I can often tell you the scientific name of the bee and the scientific name of the flower, but I know nothing about the rest of their lives. Where does this bee live? What does the bee do all day? What challenges does the plant with the flower face from other species of plants? These are all mysteries.

And so I can watch nature in the “Now” moment, observing what is going on without any expectations. Being in the “Now” moment allows me to be at peace with my surroundings, and witness without criticizing what I am seeing.

On the other hand, when I go to a Harry Potter film, I expect to be entertained by a plot, and I criticize when I am not. I still consider myself a Harry Potter fan, so I’m going to look forward to the next film after this one, but in the meanwhile I find watching nature much more interesting and engaging.

As Below, So Above

For several days now, as I have been taking my dog for a walk around a pond at the local state park, I have been assaulted by a deer fly (family Tabanidae). The fly always starts buzzing me in the same 30 meter (100 feet) stretch of path, where the acacia trees provide some shade and the winds blow gentle puffs of air.

The fly seems to have a very circumscribed territory. Once I get out of that 30 meter stretch, he breaks off his attack and disappears, only to reappear during my next circuit on that path.

I try to put myself into the world of this fly. I am guessing that his world is encompassed in a plot of land that has a diameter of 30 meters. This is all that he knows. This is all that he sees. At random unpredictable times, potential meals move into range, triggering a hunger response. Outside that range, potential meals vanish, as if they never existed.

With my superior vision, I can see the whole pond, and I can think that it is very quaint that the fly cannot realize that simply going outside his 30 meters would give him more potential meals. He is limited by his perception, in ways that I am not.

But then I think, how much are we humans limited by our perception? Many years ago, I met a farmer who had not traveled more than 20 kilometers (12 miles) from where he had been born 70 years previously. Now many of us travel around the globe fairly effortlessly, and we can use electronic means of perception to see what is happening anywhere in the world.

But our solar system is huge, our galaxy is larger, and our universe is larger still. We can’t see anything of what is happening there, with a few paltry exceptions of Hubbell telescopes and rockets sent to other planets.

Like the fly, our world is circumscribed. We can see much more than the fly, but in the larger scheme of things, our perception does not extend out much more than his, in terms of cosmic distance.

To paraphrase a Hermetic saying, “As below, so above.”  We and the fly have much in common. We both can only see a very small portion of reality. And as we delve into quantum physics, we are not very sure what really is reality. Perhaps there are intelligences greater than ours who think that it is very quaint that we cannot realize that by simply going beyond the limits of our current perception we can see a greater reality. Or perhaps not.

I don’t know if the fly worries about such questions. Current scientific thought would suggest that he is not capable of such thoughts.  And perhaps we too are not capable of thoughts that would transcend our reality, allowing us to see a larger world.

So what to do? In my case, I am simply going to enjoy my moment in Nature, and even though the fly wants to suck my blood, I am going to enjoy his buzzing, even as I wait for my steps to take me out of his range.