Nature-Deficit Disorder

“The future will belong to the nature-smart....those individuals, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of the transformative power of the natural world and who balance the virtual with the real. The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.”

~~ Richard Louv

 

I read an article recently about American writer Richard Louv theory of "nature-deficit disorder".

For most people in their 50s and 60s, memories of childhood are wrapped up with nature: visits to farms owned by friends or relatives; days spent poking around the creeks or fields that intersected the suburbs; a tree house assembled by an unsupervised crew of 10-year-olds in nearby bush, mostly using materials pinched from home.

In just one generation, Louv argues, this easy access to nature has largely disappeared. This matters in all sorts of ways. Louv cites the recent leap in the incidence of short-sightedness. According to a 2008 Australian study, 12-year-olds with the lowest levels of outdoor activity were two to three times more likely to develop myopia. The reason: their eyes have not been exercised by focusing on a distant horizon.

There's something unbelievably sad about a childhood without far horizons: not only the missing eye exercise, but the missing daydreaming and hike planning, the urge to both wander and wonder that comes with the sight of a distant horizon.

According to Louv, time in nature also reduces anxiety by giving us perspective on our problems.

I remember childhood conflicts, with either parents or friends, and how I would take off from home and go walking in the bush and climb a tree so I could look out. Suddenly I was calmer and no longer felt caught in the centre of a storm.

Instead of this time in nature, many people - both young and old - now spend time with social media. Social media, of course, has many good points, especially the way it allows us to form communities outside the limitations of what's on offer in our own neighbourhood, office or school.

It strikes me, though, that social media also involves experiences that are exactly the opposite to what I found in nature.

If the bush makes you seem a small part of a big world, social media makes you feel like a big part of a small world. If nature dissolves ego, social media pumps it up.

No wonder so many of us are anxious.

Facebook and Twitter create a sense that we're at the centre of a Universe of our own creation - we're the planet around which everything swirls: our friends, our tastes, our hobbies.

They don't call them iPads and iPhones for nothing.

Even the name Facebook suggests a mirror into which we gaze at our own reflection. There can be power in that, I guess; the self-esteem of "likes" and "retweets", friendship requests and extra "followers". Yet, as every teenager knows, ego always seems to travel hand-in-hand with self-doubt, and time spent staring appreciatively into the mirror almost always turns sour.

So remember the antidote and the cure lies just an hour or two north, or south, or east, or west of where you are sitting right now.

It waits. The sky so bright it hurts your eyes. The eucalypt leaves glinting like silver.



These two photos below were taken on 1st September 2012 when a girlfriend and myself spent 4 hours wandering through Piles Creek reserve in the Brisbane Water National Park (about an hours drive north of Sydney).

Putting It Out There!

I'm a firm believer in the power of the written word.  It’s a form of “putting it out there” to the Universe.

“The pen is mightier than the sword”.........at least so says English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839.  But this is the twenty-first century – not the nineteenth, and times have radically changed. Today most people’s writing involves e-mails, text messages, twittering, Facebook and the like; lots of touching base but little true writing.

So in these days we might ask afresh, Is the pen still mightier than the sword?  Should the written word still be considered a powerful weapon in the modern culture in which we live?

The effort of putting pen to paper (metaphorically speaking) is considerable.  Every article we write may not have a powerful result, but it could!

It can be pervasive.

It can permeates lives, penetrating where spoken words would be shut out.
One of the reasons for this is that there is an implied acceptance when we choose to pick up something to read.  In essence, we have given it the right to speak into our lives.

Because of this, an article can often penetrate a resistant heart, for just the action of choosing to read it opens the door to the truth it contains.

The pervasive power of writing also comes from the fact that, since written words easily endure, they often make it to places we would never dream.

So let the writing begin! 

“A drop of ink may make a million think.”
~~George Gordon Byron  

I found this fabulous picture on Pinterest.......my latest addiction!

Ever Widening Circles

A really useful concept or thoughtful question doesn't just sit there.

It lands!

And it doesn't just land. It touches down in your consciousness and ripples out. Circles echoing circles. Reverberating.

It sets off a chain of spiraling cycles that move outward and downward simultaneously.

What started as a stone is not just stone. Skipping out over the water, it has now become a new thing that is STONE - MEETING - WATER.

No longer an object but an encounter. Maybe even a relationship. Patterns and circles. Centre and periphery.

As each question, stone skips its way through the water, the ever-widening circles takes me places.

I find the connections.....the self-similarity.

I can feel into the stretch of continuity between past, hurting me and where I am now, and then slightly future me who is waiting, arm stretched out, full of love.

The information accessed through stone-skipping is not the stuff you know from the surface. It has a different tone, a different vibration. It has different elements too. Water and stone.

You can use anything as a stone.

A word, a quality, a mantra, a question, a thought, a rhythm, a colour, a pattern, a shape.


"My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water".
~~ Mark Twain

Above photo taken at Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, Sydney, Nov 2011 - Artist Keizo Ushio from Japan called it "Moebius in Space Planet" .
His statement - "The human being sometimes realises that we are one of the parts of nature"

WHY

Why is such a tricky question.

Maybe even the trickiest.

There are times when it is so completely not useful to ask why.


The resistance-filled why, which takes me into self-interrogation and blame.

But there is also the helpful why.


The one that is loving, curious and receptive.

"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."

 ~Friedrich Nietzsche


"Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?"
~~ Leonardo da Vinci

This beautiful monarch butterfly landed on my hand in Christchurch, New Zealand  when we went to the City Museum in February 2012.  Such a wonderful sensation.

e-revolution

We need to move past myths about e-language that the physical constraints of the new media will inevitably diminish our appetite for sustained text and thought.

Emails, Facebook, Text messages, Twitter, YouTube, some experts argue threaten to infantilise the brain. Some also say that social media is used at the expense of all other forms.

In other words, if the words, if the electronic uprising excludes other writing completely, we probably would be left thinking in short snatches.

But that is akin to saying that if the only sport we played was football, then no one would be good at tennis.....that's a big and unlikely "if".

These arguments remind me of the moral panic that has beset every new form of communication. People claimed the printing press was the devil's tool because it could disseminate lies. The telephone was going to cause family breakdown because we would stop talking to each other in person.

Now social media will deteriorate our brains because we are going to abandon all other forms of writing!

There is no credible evidence to support this assumption. Schools still require essays. Workplaces still produce reports. Universities still award degrees for these. Writers still publish books.

Writing in the new media is not a replacement but an addition to traditional genres. Much of it is a hybrid form somewhere between speech and formal writing.

It means kids are, in fact, doing a lot more writing and mastering a much wider range of styles.

"I hear YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are merging to form a super Social Media site – YouTwitFace.
~~ Conan O’Brien, The Tonight Show (June 2009)


These bookends have been part of my life for many decades. I am sure books aren't going anywhere anytime soon.