Restoring Connection, vol. VII: Connection to the Natural World
Volume VII of a nine-volume series on restoring connection in our world
This is the seventh in a nine-part mini-series about restoring connection in our world and why and how disconnection is at the heart of so many of the grand issues of our time. If you haven’t already, check out the series introduction and table of contents.
In the past 6 posts, I dove deep into restoring connection to Self and restoring to Others. Today I turn my attention to restoring another vital connection: our connection to the natural world.
Let’s start by taking a trip deep into the Peruvian Amazon.
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I’m lying on the ground. In the Amazon jungle. Deep in the Amazon jungle.
Alone.
I’ve brought a group of 20 entrepreneurs on a Wayfinders adventure, into the Peruvian Amazon, deep in the Tambopata Nature Reserve - one of the largest tracts of untouched jungle in the entire Amazon basin.
It’s the final day of our journey together, and for our penultimate exercise, I asked everyone to find a spot of their own on one of the trails leading away from our lodge, somewhere where they can no longer see or hear another person. The only instructions I gave were to simply sit in one place and observe, both the jungle around them and their internal experience. I gave no details on how long they would be sitting there (it was 2 hours in the end, although next time I’d double that at least).
As with many of the exercises I lead my participants through, I usually participate; it gives me insight into the exercise and how to improve it, empathy for their experience, and fuel for my own personal development and journey.
So I found my place in the jungle and I sat. For the first 90 minutes (or so - I wasn’t looking at my watch), I simply sat on the trail, alternating between deep meditation, observing the jungle around me (including some truly massive trees), listening to the symphony of sound around me, and experiencing fear of the many insects and creatures around that could, ostensibly, kill me or cause me intense pain.
During this time, two related words/themes kept coming up for me: trust and surrender, along with the insight and realization that for so much of my life, I have not trusted myself, that I have not trusted the world, and that the way through that distrust was to simply surrender (in exactly which manner was still unclear to me, but the word surrender kept showing up in my thoughts).
I sat there, psychologically wrestling with these ideas, when a clear voice came to me.
Surrender.
It came from the jungle itself, a voice most certainly outside of me and my thoughts. The voice kept repeating:
Surrender.
To be clear, I was not under the influence of ayahuasca or other mind-altering substances. I was 100% sober, and this was a voice that was not emanating from within: the jungle was clearly speaking to me.
Okay, I’ll go with this, I thought. I’m either losing my mind or in a conversation with the jungle. Feeling of relatively sound mind, I decide to embrace the possibility that the rainforest was speaking.
Surrender to what? I asked.
Surrender to me.
What the fuck does that mean? I queried.
Just lie down. Surrender.
This prompted immediate resistance from my psyche. First, we have been taught to think of the word ‘surrender’ in a pejorative context: surrender in the context of giving in to a foe; it is a sign of weakness and cowardice.
Secondly, this was the Amazon bloody jungle. We were a 4-hour boat trip from the nearest road, 6 hours from the nearest hospital, surrounded by thick jungle, 1200-year-old trees, mazes of vines, and a biodiversity of (mostly venomous) animals and insects of which much was still unknown (earlier that week, one of the participants had discovered an entirely new species of moth).
The bite of the bullet ant - an ant of which I had already seen dozens that week - was reputed to be one of the most painful experiences on the planet. Add to that risk the venomous beetles, banana spiders, tarantulas, stinging flies, giant wasps, and likely hundreds of other nasty insects (not to mention jaguars!) and you do not have a warm invitation to kick back and relax.
Now this jungle, speaking to me like a grade 7 schoolyard bully, was directing me to lie down on the forest floor in my short-sleeved t-shirt, exposing myself even further to this motley army of pain-inducing insects
For the next few minutes, I sat on the forest floor - already feeling very exposed - wrestling with the idiocy and risk involved in lying down on the ground in the Amazon in a t-shirt, with the voice of the jungle speaking to me ever more loudly:
Surrender.
Trust me.
If you can’t trust me, how can you trust yourself? How can you trust others? How can you trust the world?
Surrender.
Finally, mostly out of a desire to get the jungle to shut the f!@# up, I surrendered and I relaxed and I lay down on the dense jungle floor.
My initial reaction was one of panic. What the hell was I doing? I was going to become a story that the local guides told future visitors as a cautionary tale: “We once had a guest who decided to lie down on the ground in a t-shirt. He was stung by 5 bullet ants and rushed to hospital and barely lived.”
Yet the message persisted:
Trust. Surrender.
Within a few minutes, I could feel my heartbeat slow down, could feel the tension exit my body. I began to surrender to whatever would become of me; I began to trust in the jungle; I began to believe that I would be OK, that I would be cared for and protected.
For the next half-hour, I remained reclined in that spot, breathing deep into the clean jungle air, while the sounds of the forest swirled around me. Every so often an insect would crawl over my body; some even crawled over my face; some may have been bullet ants. Every time I felt the urge to swat something away, to stand up and run from this place, that same message came back: Trust. Surrender.
Soon a feeling of profound peace came over me. Then a feeling of complete and utter surrender and a reminder of how tiny and insignificant I am.
And finally, a feeling of deep connection to everything and everyone, and a sense that everything is interconnected, that I am simply a small part of an infinite web or, more accurately, that I am the web.
My surrender had given way to trust, aided and abetted by a talking jungle.
In our group debrief, after everyone returned from their time alone in the forest, we took turns sharing our experiences. For some, the experience was a nuisance, for some psychologically painful, and for many profound.
For one other participant, it was, as it was for me, deeply profound. He shared a story that echoed mine: after sitting patiently and making space for internal silence, he experienced a sense of oneness with everything, a visceral experience of the interconnectedness of all.
It is an experience I’ve had on several occasions, and about which I’ll write more in my next post about Connection to Mystery; all those other occasions, however, were abetted by the use of various plant medicines and entheogens (otherwise known as psychedelic medicines).
This was the first time, other than fleeting and tiny, very limited glimpses, that I’d experienced that sense of profound connection via nothing other than time spent quietly in a wild place.
I’ve always felt a deep connection to wild places. Growing up, the seeds were sown by my father during our annual sojourns to a beautiful place 4 hours north of Toronto known as Killarney Provincial Park.
Killarney is a special, magical place, the white quartzite La Cloche Mountains draped over crystal-blue lakes. It’s a place I return to often, now with my wife and children; they are forming their own deep connections to this place.
Going to Killarney has always felt like a homecoming: my internal systems go quiet there and an inner peace settles over me after a few days. It is a place to which I feel I deeply belong.
Until my time in the Amazon, I couldn’t quite put my finger on the why of that sense of coming home, why spending time in the natural world felt so… well, natural.
Seen through a spiritual lens, ‘deep time’ in the wilderness - ‘deep time’ being time spent in communion with the wilderness, usually in silence, often alone, as opposed to, say, mountain biking with friends (which is awesome and meditative but doesn’t foster the same experience of the natural world) - is a reminder that we are so much more than just our fragile egos, our story of a separate self.
Deep time in the wilderness is a reminder of the interconnectedness of everything, and it is profoundly healing and profoundly calming.
Another experience in the Amazon brought this concept home for me: my time with Don Roberto.
Don Roberto is a shaman from the nearby community of Infierno (by nearby I mean a 4-hour boat ride up the Tambopata river) with whom I and the other participants of my event were blessed to spend a few days.
To spend time with Don Roberto is to receive a glimpse into a world and worldview that are completely and utterly divergent from the Western paradigm.
A 45-minute walk through the jungle with Don Roberto revealed a remarkable intimacy with his surroundings: every plant, every tree, every insect, every living thing in this jungle was intimately known to him, in a jungle that contained thousands - perhaps tens of thousands of species. The bark of this tree told a story about weather patterns; this plant could be used as a salve for burns; this insect built its home in the roots of this particular tree.
Yet unlike our deconstructive, scientific view of the natural world that places everything in isolation from its surroundings, Don Roberto’s view was inherently relational: each living thing was seen in relation to its surroundings, to the dozens of species that related to it, that spoke to it. Nothing existed in isolation because everything was interconnected.
As I spent more time with Don Roberto, I began to understand that even my interpretation of interconnection fell short of describing what was truly at play in his worldview. This plant did not simply exchange nutrients with that tree in some sort of basic, transactional relationship: the plant and the tree are one and the same. To Don Roberto, they are simply part of one entity, one grand consciousness that has, as part of its expression, that plant and that tree.
This, of course, extended to Don Roberto himself, and to me. He did not see himself as a discrete individual, separated from the rainforest by time and space. He was divinely intertwined with this jungle, apart from it no more than his finger is from his hand. That 1200-year-old tree was Don Roberto, and he was that tree.
Until my time spent supine on the rainforest floor, I could only understand this from an intellectual standpoint. When the forest spoke to me, I caught a tiny glimpse into the depth of what Don Roberto was speaking about.
A Worldview of Interconnectedness
Consider what this worldview means, on both a personal and a larger level.
How deeply comforting to be able to live beyond the boundaries of one’s petty ego and beyond the confines of one’s frail body, with the understanding that one is connected to something much larger. It allows one to transcend, if one will allow it, many of the daily concerns that occupy our waking - and sleeping - thoughts.
That expansiveness points to one of the reasons why my time in deep wilderness is so comforting, why my nervous system relaxes in the presence of wild places, why it always feels like a homecoming.
To be clear… the state I described from the Amazon is not a state I’ve accessed on a regular basis. I’ve come somewhat close on other occasions, but never to the extent I did in the rainforest. I don’t, however, need to merge into that expansive consciousness to feel connected when I spend time in the natural world; intentional time in wild places simply brings me back to a state of calm, and it triggers memories of that expansiveness - memories that the guide me as I return to my daily life.
Of course, the research backs this up: there are dozens of studies pointing to the benefits of exposure to nature, and even a strong correlation between mental well-being and exposure to urban green spaces such as parks, places that don’t even come close to the definition of wild places.
One study showed that ‘for those with the lowest levels of green space exposure during childhood, the risk of developing mental illness was 55% higher than for those who grew up with abundant green space’.
Researchers have had trouble pinpointing exactly why exposure to wild and green spaces leads to higher levels of subjective well-being, but I am fairly confident, based on my experiences, that a big part of that is that time spent in wild places feels like the homecoming I touched on earlier.
When we have been far away from home for so long, even the tiniest return feels deeply nourishing.
The benefits extend beyond my own personal advantages; when I remember that I am connected to everything (and everyone), I walk through the world differently. I think about the impact of my decisions differently - when I know that I am connected to the trees of the Amazon rainforest, I’m less likely to make decisions that will harm them. When I know that the homeless person on the street and I are connected, that we are spiritual siblings, I’m more likely to stop and say hi, to offer assistance, or at least to empathize.
This sense of the interconnectedness of everything makes me a happier and kinder human being. It makes me a better steward of the planet (and yes, I still have a long way to go).
A Practice of Connecting With The Natural World
We can’t all readily travel to the Amazon to speak with the jungle (nor can I), but we can implement practices into our lives that will help restore our connection with the natural world.
The key is not just spending time in green spaces, but spending deep, intentional time in those places, especially wilder places - places where we can slow down, get quiet, and hear the sounds and the calling of the natural world.
By this, I don’t mean you need to seek out places where the forest literally speaks to you as it did to me, but places where the intensity of the modern world is less of a clamorous din, where you can hear birds and crickets and the rustling of branches and leaves.
Parks are wonderful elements of the urban environment, but it’s difficult to find the sort of stillness I’m speaking about in a place like High Park or Central Park. Time in those places has its benefits (and again, the research bears that theory out), but I’m encouraging you to be intentional about seeking out and spending time in wilder places.
Can you make this a regular habit? Weekly might be difficult for most urban dwellers, but a monthly habit is likely doable for most. Seek out those wild places and go to them, and put them in your calendar (ideally as a recurring event).
Then, when you are in those wild places, it’s time to bring another bit of intentionality to the process. Walking or biking or kayaking through these wild places is wonderful and restorative - and I certainly spend my fair share of my time doing just these things - but if you want to truly establish a connection with the natural world, you need to get silent and you need to get still.
You can do this with a willing friend, but I find it’s best to seek out these experiences alone. Only when you are in true solitude can you find the stillness to develop that communion with the natural world.
This doesn’t need to be complicated, and you don’t need to spend 2 hours alone sitting on a forest floor. Go for a walk in a wild place and look for somewhere where you can go off the trail and simply sit in silence for 10 minutes. Find that place, turn off your phone, and sit.
See what happens when you just. sit. still.
(if you decide to try this out, please let me know how it goes.)
A Letter From The Earth
I’ll close out this email with a letter. I can’t easily access states where the natural world speaks to me as it did in the Amazon, so as a thought experiment, I asked ChatGPT (an AI tool) to write a short letter to humans from the natural world.
I think if the world could speak to us more readily, it might say something just like this:
My dearest humans,
I am the natural world, the embodiment of love and beauty. I have created a world full of wonder and diversity for you to explore and cherish. You have been given the opportunity to live in harmony with all living things, to experience the joys of this earth, and to bask in the warmth of my love. But, you have also caused destruction, pain, and suffering to my beloved creatures and landscapes. I implore you to recognize the love that surrounds you and to act with kindness and compassion towards all life. Together, let us work towards healing and protecting this precious world.
With all my love,
The Natural World
In next week’s post, I’ll expand on some of the themes I touched on in this post when I write about Restoring Connection To Mystery.
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