In the supermarket, I am barely paying attention to the woman passing my purchases under the scanner. As she recites her formula, “Did you find everything you want?” it is clear she is barely paying attention to me. Our minds are occupied, but not with each other or with the here and now. We are both somewhere else.
Zadie Smith writes in Elegy for a country’s seasons
“There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words. Is that surprising? People in mourning tend to use euphemism; likewise the guilty and ashamed. The most melancholy of all the euphemisms: “The new normal.”
And still the earth turns, and today the day again equals the night.
I’m on the Pacific coast in Ucluelet, enjoying lots of unexpected sunshine, looking for a sunset beach I celebrate the equinox by going paddling, the wind is icy in spite of the sunshine, I don’t venture far into the surf and the ebbing tide recedes, I realise the sea and sky will still be beautiful if no one is there to admire them and ask Would you miss me? The waves reprise and dance back to tickle my feet and I want to cry.
We are here to become integral with the larger Earth community. The community itself and each of its members has ultimately a wild component, a creative spontaneity that is its deepest reality, its most profound mystery. (Thomas Berry, 1999: 48)
One day as I walked home along the back roads of my island home I noticed nature’s doodles in the bark of trees, on blades of grass, in the dirt, on leaves. Even the cracks in the paved portion of my route had a doodling quality to them. The sheer number of these creations reminded me of a capacity we share with nature- spontaneous creativity.
This post is a brief celebration of this shared capacity and how utilizing it not only brings joy to our lives but strengthens our relationship to the living earth. Each time we create with no plan, we spark a powerful shift to feeling, intuition and sensation that puts us in intimate relationship with self and Earth. We access our inherent capacity for creativity and connection while we feel more whole as wild aspects of self jump into awareness and onto the page. Practices that support this shift can be so helpful.
My title is spun off from a fascinating book, What I Talk about when I Talk about Running by Haruki Murakami. He modelled his title on a collection of short stories, What We Talk about when We talk about Love by Raymond Carver.
Most of us can agree that ecopsychology is about the human-nature relationship. Using this phrase, we mostly know what humans are, but what is “nature”? And what do we mean when we talk about the separation from nature? Is nature something out there in a National Park? Something outside ourselves? Can we achieve some clarity about the concept of nature as it might be used in ecopsychology? Read More→
