Year of Spiritual Thinking

Turning to Nature to Nurture Our Spirits

It is the force of love that will lead us beyond fragmentation, loneliness, and fear. 
—Sharon Salzburg, Finding Your Way: Meditations, Thoughts, and Wisdom for Living an Authentic Life

Hello Friends,

The past week has been extremely difficult for me, personally and globally. So I’ve been spending a lot of time outside, even on cold days. In order to love this world, to be part of what Sharon Salzburg calls “the force of love,” I need to nurture my own spirits. For that, I turn to nature, the world of interrelationships that make up the community of the land. So today I’m offering some rituals I use to nurture my spirits with nature, in hopes you’ll find them useful and/or inspiring too.

Vitamin N: What Time in Nature gives Us

“Vitamin N,” as some researchers call time in nature, is beneficial for our health in so many ways, it’s almost impossible to list them all.

Time in nature lowers our stress levels, calms our fight or flight responses, drops our heart rates and blood pressure, strengthens our compassion circuits, increases our ability to focus and concentrate, helps us with decision making and critical thinking, heightens our capacity for both empathy and self-love, lessens depression and feelings of hopelessness and helplessness….

If Vitamin N were a prescription, it would be the ultimate and probably horrifyingly expensive health drug. Instead, it’s free and available to all of us, wherever we are.

We can all use a boost of health and wellness and spiritual “juice” right now. Here are a couple of rituals I use to ground myself and immerse myself in whatever nature is around me. Whether you adopt these rituals as your own, modify them to suit you, or are inspired to create entirely different rituals matters not.

The point is to get yourself outside and strengthen your own health and your “force of love” by soaking in and connecting with nature nearby. Giving love to that which is larger than ourselves and receiving love in return.

These are rituals you can use anywhere—city, suburb, town, rural, wilderness. It doesn’t matter where you are, nature and the healing benefits of that community of diverse lives are there in some form or other. The truth is, nature is us: we are each comprised of an ecosystem of billions of microbial lives, without whom our bodies, minds and spirits cannot and do not function.

“You wrote so beautifully, weeks ago, of how one’s capacity to give love grows with the exercise of it, so perhaps the more love we have received, the more we are able to absorb….” Rachel Carson, Always Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964

Four Directions: Here in Place

This is a simple breathing exercise to connect with where you are, whether you are inside or out. I use it in my every-morning yoga routine to nurture my connection to the landscape. It’s also wonderfully calming.

First, orient yourself mentally to where you are by visualizing a landmark (a natural landmark, like a stream or hill, a meadow or cliff, a big tree or a bay—not part of the built environment) for each of the four cardinal directions. What recognizable natural landmark is to the east? Create a clear image of that landmark in your mind. If you’re in a city, cast your mind to the nearest one. What is to the South? Same thing. The West? The North?

Once you have images in your mind, take a moment to center yourself, whether you are sitting or standing or lying down.

Breathe in deeply, all the way into your belly, hold for four beats, and then as you breathe out, salute the first direction, the East (first because it’s where the sun rises). Whether you say, “East, where the sun rises” out loud or silently, invoke the image of the landmark in your inner vision. Let yourself feel a connection to the direction and the land.

Then take another deep breath, hold it for four beats, and as you exhale, salute the South, “South, where the light comes from,” and invoke the image of the landmark representing the south. Again, feel your connection to the direction and the place.

Then take another deep breath, hold it, and as you breathe out, salute the West, “West, where the sun sets,” and bring the image of the landmark symbolizing West into your mind and feel your connection.

With the next deep breath, hold, and as you exhale, salute the North, “North, where the cold comes from,” and bring the image of the landmark that stands for North into your consciousness and feel your connection to that direction and that landmark.

If you can turn to face each direction as you salute them, you’ll feel the exercise more deeply.

Then take four more deep breaths, holding each before exhaling fully, to salute you, in place. First, “Mother Earth,” reaching toward the earth if possible; next breath, “Father Sky,” stretch overhead; third breath, “Community of the Land,” circling to encompass the whole landscape; and fourth, touching your heart, “Self at home, in place.”

This combination of breath and connection is easier to do than to explain! And it is incredibly effective at subtly bringing your awareness to the land and the community of nature wherever you are. I use the eight breaths and salutes to time my yoga asanas, four breaths to a pose, saluting the four directions and visualizing the landmarks as one series, saluting earth, sky, community of the land, and self as another series of four breaths.

You can do this while performing many kinds of exercises or simply when sitting still, using your breath to connect to the larger world, and to increase your awareness of the landscape where you are. Used regularly, this ritual can root and ground you.

Adopt a Spot

Make a friend in nature, a place or being you can visit and spend time with on a regular basis. (This is easiest with a place or being who isn’t mobile. For example: a large rock, a curve of stream bank, an untended corner, a tree like the huge old American elm in the photo above, or even a patch of moss or lichen on a wall or sidewalk.)

As you explore your neighborhood, “listen” for a spot that calls to you.

For one friend, it’s a tree with a peculiar shape in a city park, for another, the river from the deck of her houseboat. It could be an overlook, a nook in a courtyard, a place in a garden, or a particular view from your window if mobility is an issue.

Adopt that spot as your place. Spend time there, get to know the inhabitants (I recommend Seek, a free app from iNaturalist for learning the more-than-human lives), listen for the characteristic sounds, inhale the fragrances. Pay attention how it changes over the seasons. Bring it your grief, your joy; your frustrations, your celebrations.

Be reciprocal and give back to the place: write about what you see, hear, and feel. Take notes of who else is there and how the spot changes over time. Pick up trash, remove invasive plants or critters who might be harmful, help others respect your special spot.

Getting to know a small patch of this enormous earth is like having a living touchstone, a gift that goes both ways, a gift to you of connection to one very specific place or being; a gift from you of your care and witness, your awareness and love.

In her new book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, scientist and native wisdom-keeper Robin Wall Kimmerer asks herself what in the human gift economy functions as the “sun”—the constantly replenishing source of energy—and answers, “Maybe it is love.”

Love as humans’ source of spiritual and temporal energy and renewal—amen!

We can all replenish our energy and our light in the world by grounding ourselves every day, and adopting one particular spot on this planet to love. Because, as Rachel Carson realized, “one’s capacity to give love grows with the exercise of it.”

Onward into the fog, with love….

Susan