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Nature, Love, Medicine: Essays on Wildness and Wellness
"A beautiful collaboration that brings together diverse perspectives…a common passion and sense of beauty unites the book and transcends any expectations."
— BOOKLIST
A diverse array of people—psychologists and poets, biologists and artists, a Buddhist teacher and a rock musician— share personal stories that reveal a common when we pay conscious, careful attention to our wider world, we strengthen our core humanity. This practice of natural history leads to greater physical, psychological, and social health for individuals and communities. Nature, Love, Medicine features writers with varied backgrounds and talents. Notable contributors range from conservationist and author Brooke Williams and award–winning author Elisabeth Tova Bailey to Vietnamese Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and internationally known poet Jane Hirshfield.
THOMAS LOWE FLEISCHNER , editor of Nature, Love, Medicine , is a naturalist and conservation biologist, and founding director of the Natural History Institute at Prescott College, where he has taught interdisciplinary environmental studies for almost three decades. He edited The Way of Natural History and authored Singing A Natural History of the Escalante Canyons and Desert Wetlands .
— BOOKLIST
A diverse array of people—psychologists and poets, biologists and artists, a Buddhist teacher and a rock musician— share personal stories that reveal a common when we pay conscious, careful attention to our wider world, we strengthen our core humanity. This practice of natural history leads to greater physical, psychological, and social health for individuals and communities. Nature, Love, Medicine features writers with varied backgrounds and talents. Notable contributors range from conservationist and author Brooke Williams and award–winning author Elisabeth Tova Bailey to Vietnamese Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and internationally known poet Jane Hirshfield.
THOMAS LOWE FLEISCHNER , editor of Nature, Love, Medicine , is a naturalist and conservation biologist, and founding director of the Natural History Institute at Prescott College, where he has taught interdisciplinary environmental studies for almost three decades. He edited The Way of Natural History and authored Singing A Natural History of the Escalante Canyons and Desert Wetlands .
270 pages, Paperback
Published November 14, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
December 30, 2020
note: does not have a decolonial analysis, some essays are weird wrt race
September 19, 2018
Loved this, of course. A wonderful mix of essays that was perfect to complete before my first day at my new job. Such a variety. Some more scientific, some more emotional. Confirmed my own personal feelings of the importance of being connected to nature to be connected also to others. Loved the theme of the importance of language and being able to name these living things, which connects us to them even more.
Favorite lines:
8, Thomas Lowe Fleischner: But the Earth is a gift, not a problem--and loving the world is as important as grieving for it. Being an awake and engaged human being is rooted fundamentally in an unequivocal love of the world. Our deepest affinity is for this rich and remarkable world we live in--our fellow beings, the textures and colors of landforms, the luscious scents of each place we touch. The term "biophilia" indicates our innate urge to affiliate with other forms of life.
As we fall more deeply in love with the world, we learn to love ourselves more fully, and learn to care for our surroundings and our fellow beings more completely. Paying attention to nature--something beyond ourselves--is how we develop, nurture, and express our love of the creation. All good things emanate from this affection for the world--caring, compassionate, deep engagement, and meaning.
9: But immersion in the complexity, unpredictability, and, occasionally, the ferociousness of the natural world almost always teaches humility.
36, Nalini Nadkarni: When one is in love--especially with something as huge and beautiful and complex as trees--there is an urge to share this emotion with everyone, especially to those who have no opportunity to experience such feelings themselves.
43, Alberto Burquez: Leopold left implicit the idea that living on a farm provided an intimate knowledge of nature. That knowledge, in some cases, transcends the utilitarian value of farming and paves the path for the budding naturalist. Today, only naturalists and shamans--powerful naturalists from our deep past--could be aware of the dimension of nature's values. My friend Michael Soule, a key player in modern conservation biology, clearly stated that "biotic diversity has intrinsic value, irrespective of its instrumental or utilitarian value."
55, Gwen Annette Heistand*: Nature's ingenuity providing crab with the potential for generating its limb and heron with a snack. When I think of my decades int eh corporate world, I think of that crab. Shedding limb after limb--until what was left? Corporate. Corporal. Corpus. Body. How to re-member?
57: How did I get form childhood immersed in field and stream and marsh to an office building in downtown Oakland?
It turns out, bit by bit. Slowly a lifetime is limned by the decisions we make. Each relationship. Each move. Each crisis. Each job. I wonder where my shell records the moment when money and my fear of not having it become the currency of my life. Money is just a chit, an IOU. Currency i\n its pure form is the combination of energy and time required to live. From Latin currentia: a flowing. The same root as current: belonging to the present time; passing from one to another; a smooth and steady onward movement.
61: The juxtaposition of urban renewal and endocast and beach garbage got me wondering again about ethics and speciation and what draws one body to another. What are ethics but what we respect, what we cherish, what we nourish, what we protect? How could I be attracted to a person or a way of life that is party to destroying all I hold dear?
82, Stephen Trimble: I copied quotes from On the Loose onto the matboards that surrounded my photos from my hikes. I can recite those passages from memory, still. Adventure is not in the guidebook and Beauty is not on the map. Seek and ye shall find.
84: In The Defining Decade, Meg Jay articulates what these experiences accomplish for twentysomethings. These are the years of exploration to build "identity capital," the mind-expanding encounters that adults draw on for self-definition. Jay notes that eighty percent of life's most defining moments happen bye the time we're thirty-five.
89, Laura Sewall*: But according to ecopsychologist Robert Greenway and a host of like-minded thinkers, our linguistic baseline has long lacked an adequate language to account for the true texture of our lived relationships with all things natural. Either way--by virtue of a long decline in a language rich with natural reference, or as a result of recent losses in basic biological terms--the fundamental cost of an impoverished lexicon is a form of collective forgetting. It's altogether (and all together) forgetting that we have forgotten the value of deepened experience with non-human others, essentially relegating wild and natural experience to romanticism or oblivion--a form of collective cognitive loss.
91: For clarification and as a visual psychologist, I must add that we condition our senses by what we pay attention to. With respect to language, we most easily see what we have already named (requiring our directed attention), our brains so wired and ready to zero in on whatever has been previously identified, especially with repetition and self-interest thrown into the mix.
93: On a late winter evening, while tucked around a large stone fireplace and yearning for spring--I asked a friend how she expresses her love for the natural world. I wondered if she talks to plants like I do, calling them "honey" and "sweetheart" while tending to them. ... "It's just so miraculous..." her voice trailing off. Then she opened her eyes, sat up straight, and expounded on the miracle of seeds and plants, and the way plants let us live by pumping the sky with oxygen; on the oxygen cycle itself, and on the wonderment of life. Every few sentences she'd say, "It's a miracle!" By the end, she was radiant.
94: [Anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf] found the Hopi speaking in animated terms, their language loaded with verbs and their worldview filled by the vibrant lives of non-human others. In contrast, our noun-rich and verb-poor way of speaking conditions a worldview made of static and inert objects. No doubt this predisposes us to utilitarian relationships, thus minimizing mutuality and intimacy with all the "other" relations.
We are missing both ways of speaking affectionately and loving terms for plants and undomesticated animals, for the non-human lives that trot through our own, provoking an understanding of other, of something very different than our singular, anxious selves. And yet we know that our engagement with the natural world offers us gifts and good health in all sorts of miraculous ways, from the breath of life to strengthened muscles and self-confidence; to the wisdom gained by knowing our place in the world, that is, by knowing where we stand and what we will stand for; to magically restoring our attention and raising our spirits by walking in the woods, or anywhere else that natural things grow. We even heal faster from surgery and trauma when plants grow in our rooms or appear outside our windows. There is no question or complex equation here. The complexity lies in the utterly unquantifable exchanges between our sensing selves and the man "voices' out-beyond--pulsed in rhythm, blazing in light, and pressing against us like a river running by. Only missing are the human utterances, lovingly directed toward the wild ones who croak, chirp, yelp, whistle, and howl.
If the undomesticated world offers us so much health and beauty, so much glinting and swishing and so many opportunities to fall in love each and every day, how do we--or will we--express ourselves as a streamrolling, wideband culture seeps us further into an era of human domination, into the ultra-anthropocene?
98, Sewall: [Story about Jeffrey Tambor speaking about resources and letting the waters be rough] Without fully realizing it, "rough" is where I began these comments on language, love, and good medicine. I had been wondering how we might find health in our relationships with the natural world when we know it to be profoundly suffering for the twisted sake of our material gain. In contemplating the question, I soon found myself suffering in tandem. I know the feeling well. It's a form of psychological pain, like despair--but not quite. It is a mix of melancholy and hujan shame, of foreboding loss and loneliness. It is missing the hundreds of monarchs that fluttered by every summer, and the blue mussels that gave of themselves whenever I had a special guest for dinner. I do not have a word, or words, to describe this mix of sensation and sorrow, of love and pain, in me, the feeling is flavored with rage, and equally, with a desire to honor the losses--and so, whatever I say, it must be mindful.
108, Edie Dillon: Awareness of serendipity is not dumb luck; it is a developable quality of mind that rises from openness to the unexpected. ... The gift of serendipity is that we can use it to create a new story,or, in our current predicament, a new ending to the same story. ... It turns out that super encounterers get that way in part because they expect serendipity. Appreciating that they will gain new perspective, they consciously develop a capacity for noticing, for imagination, for alternate stories.
What we pay attention to, and how that affects what we choose to keep or throw away, be they materials, ideas, or specifics of the natural environment, can change the stories we tell and the possibilities we allow.
113, Dillon: This day was graced with serendipity, an ordinary thing gone magic, a new and different ending to a sorry tale. We know that young men die and mountains burn. We know that life is full of sorrow and change, and we sometimes find hope that change brings new beauty.
119: Sarah Juniper Rabkin: Relinquishing the need to see myself as smart and knowledgeable feels like letting go of a debilitating illness, something toxic in the blood and heavy in the bones. jack Laws insists that it's okay to bumble and fumble in the pursuit of understanding. Such encouragement to experiment and get things wrong is in fact more than okay: it's a balm, a tonic, a potent remedy.
120: Rabkin: I opted not to erase those initial attempts, choosing instead to honor the record of my learning process. The rough sketches remind me of something a naturalist friend once said, affirming the great relief she feels "when I realize I that I get to fail, again and again."
125, Rabkin: Intimate encounters with the world that made us can have a damping effect on human egotism and arrogance.
133, Mitchell Thomashow*: Educators and activists must broaden the constituency for natural history by accepting that it may not ever be a priority for millions of good people who want to lead a better life.
134: Thomashow: Reciprocity is the opposite of profit. We live in a world in which reciprocity and profit are jumbled and confused, and we often mistake one for the other. A thin line separates mutual benefit from exploitation and it takes a reflective mind to distinguish between the two.
137: Thomashow: This is natural history, too. This is the story of how people live and die, how they earn a living, how they move from place to place, how they mate--the same things we love to observe in the natural world. there's no way we'll preserve the world's ecosystems unless we give equal attention to preserving the everyday lives of ordinary people, or at least acknowledge the close interconnection between these issues.
140: Thomashow: I don't have the capacity to love every species and every person, but I can develop the capacity to be more generous with those people and species that I do encounter.
169, Saul Weisberg: Nature was the place where I found the space and time to watch and listen and feel It still shapes how I engage with the world.
170, Weisberg: [Muir:] "Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
171, Weisberg: I fall in love with the world all over again. And while many people share this experience, and seek it out on a regular basis, many more don't. Sometimes I'm okay with that, especially wen I look out across the lake and relish our solitude. But I worry about the future: without direct experience of nature, how will people develop the political will to protect these landscapes?
177, Weisberg: Solitary experiences teach us how to listen and reflect. They provide additional levels of challenge but bring you a little closer to the edge. Shared experiences add multiple dimensions to the experience and help build community. One way is not better than other; we choose what we need each time we go outside.
188, Pablo Deutstua Jochamowitz: "Nature is not a place to visit, it is home."
192, Peter H. Kahn, Jr.: The crux is that with each ensuing generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation tends to take that degraded condition as the non-degraded condition, as the normal experience. This is what I have been calling environmental generational amnesia It helps explain how cities continue to lose nature, and why people don't really see it happening, and to the extent they do, they don't think it's too much of a problem.
195, Kahn: the overall finding is that interacting with technological nature is usually better than nothing, but not as good as actual nature.
204, Lauret Savoy: Wondering if I should hate in return, I learned a crucial lesson. The land did not hate. People did.
207, Jana Richman: In a dark time, the eye begins to see (Theodore Roethke)
214, Richman: I had done what every well-meaning person in his life--every lover, every friend--had done. I had tried to fix him. And in doing so, I had delivered a sharp message: I cannot love you this way.
215, Richman: But removing myself as custodian of his state of being has given us space without shame.
237, Robin Wall Kimmerer*: I have wondered whether par tof the medicine for what ails us lies in language. What if we had new pronoun, which lets us speak of the living world as beings, which cultivates respectful relationship instead of isolation, to feel ourselves part of a community?
238, Kimmerer: A great deal is lost when we no longer recognize the gifts at our feet. WE start to think that our sustenance comes from the store, that well-being is a commodity and not a gift. Plant blindness comes at a cost to our bodies and our psyches. We start to believe that the world is made of stuff, and forget Thomas Berry's teaching that the universe is not a collection of objects, but a community of subjects. Living in a world made of stuff is lonely and stressful. Living in a world made of beings is enlivening of curiosity, empathy, and relationship.
239, Kimmerer: Our encounters with nature, if we have them at all, are reduced to the currency of economic and scientific engagement with "ecosystem services," or with flickering images on a screen. Fro many, any sense of emotional or spiritual connection with a landscape has been lost, without even knowing what is missing. WE feel ourselves on the outside looking in, at a vibrant web of reciprocal exchanges from which we have excluded ourselves and called it progress.
248, Thich Nhat Hanh: There's a revolution that needs to happen and it starts from inside each one of us. WE need to wake up and fall in love with Earth. We've been Homo sapiens for along time. Now it's time to be come Homo conscious. Our love and admiration for the Earth has the power to unite us and remove all boundaries, separation, and discrimination.
Favorite lines:
8, Thomas Lowe Fleischner: But the Earth is a gift, not a problem--and loving the world is as important as grieving for it. Being an awake and engaged human being is rooted fundamentally in an unequivocal love of the world. Our deepest affinity is for this rich and remarkable world we live in--our fellow beings, the textures and colors of landforms, the luscious scents of each place we touch. The term "biophilia" indicates our innate urge to affiliate with other forms of life.
As we fall more deeply in love with the world, we learn to love ourselves more fully, and learn to care for our surroundings and our fellow beings more completely. Paying attention to nature--something beyond ourselves--is how we develop, nurture, and express our love of the creation. All good things emanate from this affection for the world--caring, compassionate, deep engagement, and meaning.
9: But immersion in the complexity, unpredictability, and, occasionally, the ferociousness of the natural world almost always teaches humility.
36, Nalini Nadkarni: When one is in love--especially with something as huge and beautiful and complex as trees--there is an urge to share this emotion with everyone, especially to those who have no opportunity to experience such feelings themselves.
43, Alberto Burquez: Leopold left implicit the idea that living on a farm provided an intimate knowledge of nature. That knowledge, in some cases, transcends the utilitarian value of farming and paves the path for the budding naturalist. Today, only naturalists and shamans--powerful naturalists from our deep past--could be aware of the dimension of nature's values. My friend Michael Soule, a key player in modern conservation biology, clearly stated that "biotic diversity has intrinsic value, irrespective of its instrumental or utilitarian value."
55, Gwen Annette Heistand*: Nature's ingenuity providing crab with the potential for generating its limb and heron with a snack. When I think of my decades int eh corporate world, I think of that crab. Shedding limb after limb--until what was left? Corporate. Corporal. Corpus. Body. How to re-member?
57: How did I get form childhood immersed in field and stream and marsh to an office building in downtown Oakland?
It turns out, bit by bit. Slowly a lifetime is limned by the decisions we make. Each relationship. Each move. Each crisis. Each job. I wonder where my shell records the moment when money and my fear of not having it become the currency of my life. Money is just a chit, an IOU. Currency i\n its pure form is the combination of energy and time required to live. From Latin currentia: a flowing. The same root as current: belonging to the present time; passing from one to another; a smooth and steady onward movement.
61: The juxtaposition of urban renewal and endocast and beach garbage got me wondering again about ethics and speciation and what draws one body to another. What are ethics but what we respect, what we cherish, what we nourish, what we protect? How could I be attracted to a person or a way of life that is party to destroying all I hold dear?
82, Stephen Trimble: I copied quotes from On the Loose onto the matboards that surrounded my photos from my hikes. I can recite those passages from memory, still. Adventure is not in the guidebook and Beauty is not on the map. Seek and ye shall find.
84: In The Defining Decade, Meg Jay articulates what these experiences accomplish for twentysomethings. These are the years of exploration to build "identity capital," the mind-expanding encounters that adults draw on for self-definition. Jay notes that eighty percent of life's most defining moments happen bye the time we're thirty-five.
89, Laura Sewall*: But according to ecopsychologist Robert Greenway and a host of like-minded thinkers, our linguistic baseline has long lacked an adequate language to account for the true texture of our lived relationships with all things natural. Either way--by virtue of a long decline in a language rich with natural reference, or as a result of recent losses in basic biological terms--the fundamental cost of an impoverished lexicon is a form of collective forgetting. It's altogether (and all together) forgetting that we have forgotten the value of deepened experience with non-human others, essentially relegating wild and natural experience to romanticism or oblivion--a form of collective cognitive loss.
91: For clarification and as a visual psychologist, I must add that we condition our senses by what we pay attention to. With respect to language, we most easily see what we have already named (requiring our directed attention), our brains so wired and ready to zero in on whatever has been previously identified, especially with repetition and self-interest thrown into the mix.
93: On a late winter evening, while tucked around a large stone fireplace and yearning for spring--I asked a friend how she expresses her love for the natural world. I wondered if she talks to plants like I do, calling them "honey" and "sweetheart" while tending to them. ... "It's just so miraculous..." her voice trailing off. Then she opened her eyes, sat up straight, and expounded on the miracle of seeds and plants, and the way plants let us live by pumping the sky with oxygen; on the oxygen cycle itself, and on the wonderment of life. Every few sentences she'd say, "It's a miracle!" By the end, she was radiant.
94: [Anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf] found the Hopi speaking in animated terms, their language loaded with verbs and their worldview filled by the vibrant lives of non-human others. In contrast, our noun-rich and verb-poor way of speaking conditions a worldview made of static and inert objects. No doubt this predisposes us to utilitarian relationships, thus minimizing mutuality and intimacy with all the "other" relations.
We are missing both ways of speaking affectionately and loving terms for plants and undomesticated animals, for the non-human lives that trot through our own, provoking an understanding of other, of something very different than our singular, anxious selves. And yet we know that our engagement with the natural world offers us gifts and good health in all sorts of miraculous ways, from the breath of life to strengthened muscles and self-confidence; to the wisdom gained by knowing our place in the world, that is, by knowing where we stand and what we will stand for; to magically restoring our attention and raising our spirits by walking in the woods, or anywhere else that natural things grow. We even heal faster from surgery and trauma when plants grow in our rooms or appear outside our windows. There is no question or complex equation here. The complexity lies in the utterly unquantifable exchanges between our sensing selves and the man "voices' out-beyond--pulsed in rhythm, blazing in light, and pressing against us like a river running by. Only missing are the human utterances, lovingly directed toward the wild ones who croak, chirp, yelp, whistle, and howl.
If the undomesticated world offers us so much health and beauty, so much glinting and swishing and so many opportunities to fall in love each and every day, how do we--or will we--express ourselves as a streamrolling, wideband culture seeps us further into an era of human domination, into the ultra-anthropocene?
98, Sewall: [Story about Jeffrey Tambor speaking about resources and letting the waters be rough] Without fully realizing it, "rough" is where I began these comments on language, love, and good medicine. I had been wondering how we might find health in our relationships with the natural world when we know it to be profoundly suffering for the twisted sake of our material gain. In contemplating the question, I soon found myself suffering in tandem. I know the feeling well. It's a form of psychological pain, like despair--but not quite. It is a mix of melancholy and hujan shame, of foreboding loss and loneliness. It is missing the hundreds of monarchs that fluttered by every summer, and the blue mussels that gave of themselves whenever I had a special guest for dinner. I do not have a word, or words, to describe this mix of sensation and sorrow, of love and pain, in me, the feeling is flavored with rage, and equally, with a desire to honor the losses--and so, whatever I say, it must be mindful.
108, Edie Dillon: Awareness of serendipity is not dumb luck; it is a developable quality of mind that rises from openness to the unexpected. ... The gift of serendipity is that we can use it to create a new story,or, in our current predicament, a new ending to the same story. ... It turns out that super encounterers get that way in part because they expect serendipity. Appreciating that they will gain new perspective, they consciously develop a capacity for noticing, for imagination, for alternate stories.
What we pay attention to, and how that affects what we choose to keep or throw away, be they materials, ideas, or specifics of the natural environment, can change the stories we tell and the possibilities we allow.
113, Dillon: This day was graced with serendipity, an ordinary thing gone magic, a new and different ending to a sorry tale. We know that young men die and mountains burn. We know that life is full of sorrow and change, and we sometimes find hope that change brings new beauty.
119: Sarah Juniper Rabkin: Relinquishing the need to see myself as smart and knowledgeable feels like letting go of a debilitating illness, something toxic in the blood and heavy in the bones. jack Laws insists that it's okay to bumble and fumble in the pursuit of understanding. Such encouragement to experiment and get things wrong is in fact more than okay: it's a balm, a tonic, a potent remedy.
120: Rabkin: I opted not to erase those initial attempts, choosing instead to honor the record of my learning process. The rough sketches remind me of something a naturalist friend once said, affirming the great relief she feels "when I realize I that I get to fail, again and again."
125, Rabkin: Intimate encounters with the world that made us can have a damping effect on human egotism and arrogance.
133, Mitchell Thomashow*: Educators and activists must broaden the constituency for natural history by accepting that it may not ever be a priority for millions of good people who want to lead a better life.
134: Thomashow: Reciprocity is the opposite of profit. We live in a world in which reciprocity and profit are jumbled and confused, and we often mistake one for the other. A thin line separates mutual benefit from exploitation and it takes a reflective mind to distinguish between the two.
137: Thomashow: This is natural history, too. This is the story of how people live and die, how they earn a living, how they move from place to place, how they mate--the same things we love to observe in the natural world. there's no way we'll preserve the world's ecosystems unless we give equal attention to preserving the everyday lives of ordinary people, or at least acknowledge the close interconnection between these issues.
140: Thomashow: I don't have the capacity to love every species and every person, but I can develop the capacity to be more generous with those people and species that I do encounter.
169, Saul Weisberg: Nature was the place where I found the space and time to watch and listen and feel It still shapes how I engage with the world.
170, Weisberg: [Muir:] "Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
171, Weisberg: I fall in love with the world all over again. And while many people share this experience, and seek it out on a regular basis, many more don't. Sometimes I'm okay with that, especially wen I look out across the lake and relish our solitude. But I worry about the future: without direct experience of nature, how will people develop the political will to protect these landscapes?
177, Weisberg: Solitary experiences teach us how to listen and reflect. They provide additional levels of challenge but bring you a little closer to the edge. Shared experiences add multiple dimensions to the experience and help build community. One way is not better than other; we choose what we need each time we go outside.
188, Pablo Deutstua Jochamowitz: "Nature is not a place to visit, it is home."
192, Peter H. Kahn, Jr.: The crux is that with each ensuing generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation tends to take that degraded condition as the non-degraded condition, as the normal experience. This is what I have been calling environmental generational amnesia It helps explain how cities continue to lose nature, and why people don't really see it happening, and to the extent they do, they don't think it's too much of a problem.
195, Kahn: the overall finding is that interacting with technological nature is usually better than nothing, but not as good as actual nature.
204, Lauret Savoy: Wondering if I should hate in return, I learned a crucial lesson. The land did not hate. People did.
207, Jana Richman: In a dark time, the eye begins to see (Theodore Roethke)
214, Richman: I had done what every well-meaning person in his life--every lover, every friend--had done. I had tried to fix him. And in doing so, I had delivered a sharp message: I cannot love you this way.
215, Richman: But removing myself as custodian of his state of being has given us space without shame.
237, Robin Wall Kimmerer*: I have wondered whether par tof the medicine for what ails us lies in language. What if we had new pronoun, which lets us speak of the living world as beings, which cultivates respectful relationship instead of isolation, to feel ourselves part of a community?
238, Kimmerer: A great deal is lost when we no longer recognize the gifts at our feet. WE start to think that our sustenance comes from the store, that well-being is a commodity and not a gift. Plant blindness comes at a cost to our bodies and our psyches. We start to believe that the world is made of stuff, and forget Thomas Berry's teaching that the universe is not a collection of objects, but a community of subjects. Living in a world made of stuff is lonely and stressful. Living in a world made of beings is enlivening of curiosity, empathy, and relationship.
239, Kimmerer: Our encounters with nature, if we have them at all, are reduced to the currency of economic and scientific engagement with "ecosystem services," or with flickering images on a screen. Fro many, any sense of emotional or spiritual connection with a landscape has been lost, without even knowing what is missing. WE feel ourselves on the outside looking in, at a vibrant web of reciprocal exchanges from which we have excluded ourselves and called it progress.
248, Thich Nhat Hanh: There's a revolution that needs to happen and it starts from inside each one of us. WE need to wake up and fall in love with Earth. We've been Homo sapiens for along time. Now it's time to be come Homo conscious. Our love and admiration for the Earth has the power to unite us and remove all boundaries, separation, and discrimination.
July 22, 2018
Nature, Love, Medicine is a collection of essays on the essential value of humans' relationship with the natural world and its capacity to heal us. Some of the essays were stronger than others. The best were a few that caused me to think about our relationship with plants and animals in a whole new way, such as Robin Wall Kimmerer's essay Heal-All about the medicinal properties of plants and our lack of awareness of the living things around us.
May 22, 2018
Some really wonderful essays, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s especially.
June 18, 2025
Checked this out because I wanted to read the Robin Wall Kimmerer essay; the entire book was rich, in fact, sometimes an essay would just sneak up on me and just grab me before I knew it, making me feel or think something deep inside. Quite a few of these relate to the connection between nature and mental health, in their own way. Great collection.
April 29, 2024
This was the final read of the semester for my Oceans of Thought Class and I thought it was a really thoughtful way to conclude the class. This book is a collection of essays that talk about all of the ways a love for nature heals us as humans. I thought the essays all blended together perfectly and really reminded me of all the reasons why I love nature.
February 18, 2018
I had a hard time engaging with the book, which I think says more about my and the time of my life than the book itself. I found some passages very engaging. Others I had no patience for. And biophilia was defined too many times.
January 26, 2023
These essays enhanced my appreciation of the natural world and reminded me of how healing, physically and emotionally, it can be to spend time in a natural environment. The authors’ love of wild spaces inspired me to spend time there too. I will read more writings by several of them.
December 29, 2019
I'm quickly giving a 5 star to my favorite books of 2019 - and this was one of them!
November 2, 2021
A couple good essays.
A number of dry ones.
A number of dry ones.
February 23, 2022
Read an essay each morning. My favorites were the poems.
April 9, 2022
Really not sure what I thought of this book.
January 18, 2024
Thought provoking but also a but repetitive. It is a good reminder of all of the different ways you can enjoy nature and the effect it can have on you.
June 22, 2018
This book made me climb trees and paint blackberry flowers and bees. Every essay made me want to get outside! While there is repetition on how being outside is scientifically good for us, each contributor brings a unique focus through their personal natural history journeys. This book argues that natural history is attentiveness to nature around us (and that we are a part of). Natural history could mean walking under trees in the city, learning to recognize and name birds and plants, restructuring our language to stop separating ourselves from our landscapes, advocating for more sound environmental policies, watching snails in a terrarium, or playing in the mud.
October 11, 2018
Extraordinary book on nature’s power to heal us. The stories and viewpoints are all so different yet they still come to the analysis of the enduring beauty, peace and love we can find when we come back to nature.
I especially loved the stories that tackled illness & mental health issues and how even at those trying times, nature saves.
I especially loved the stories that tackled illness & mental health issues and how even at those trying times, nature saves.
July 23, 2018
A collection of short essays about the healing power of Nature.
April 15, 2019
Some essays very good, some not my style. I want to return to this when I am more in the mood for an essay collection--will probably appreciate it more
October 5, 2019
Meh ...
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