Connecting with nature

BRIAN MERTINS

Your connection to nature is as vital to your health and well-being as the food you eat and the air you breathe.

For thousands of years, humans have relied on their knowledge of place to survive. They watched the land carefully and learned everything they could about the natural world. They knew how to move around the massive landscape to find the ripest foods and medicines.

Getting to know their place year after year led people to develop a feeling of kinship with the land. They developed an awareness that went deeper than simple knowledge of facts about plants and animals. They came to love nature as a living thing and they developed customs around care-taking, harvesting, movement and hunting that allowed the land to flourish – nature under the care of human beings with deep connections to the land is more fertile and abundant than nature left alone.

In the modern world, however, things are different. Gone are the days when childhood meant sneaking through the forest, picking berries and lazing around listening to the crickets in the late afternoon sun. Instead, children are growing up spending more and more time inside, walking on constructed pavement and rarely, if ever, eating food that was picked with their own hands. The result is that we lose our feelings of connection to nature and the mental, emotional and physical health benefits that go with it. Richard Louv, the author of Last Child in the Woods, calls this nature deficit disorder. We are evolving into a disconnected society, which has consequences for our quality of life – but there is hope. When we learn to reconnect with nature, it allows us to rediscover all the benefits that nature has for our minds and bodies. We discover aliveness, peace and a deep desire to care for the earth.

I work with people to facilitate the integration of routines that create nature connection. In the same way that spending quality time with people helps us to develop relationships, when people spend quality time and have experiences with nature, we start to feel a relationship developing.

The best way to spend quality time with nature is using a practice called the sit spot. It involves adopting a single place in nature that you visit as often as you can to sit and observe nature. We always tell people to choose your spot close to your house and, ideally, within a two- or three-minute walk. It could be beside a tree in the park down the street, in your backyard garden, on the lawn or even on your front porch.

When people first start going to their sit spot, they have all sorts of new experiences. As they sit for even 10 or 15 minutes a day, they begin to develop observation skills, they’re using their eyes, ears and even their nose in new ways to learn about nature and it starts to awaken something inside them. As they continue having experiences in nature, not only do they begin to accumulate lots of knowledge but they also awaken an internal transformation that begins to connect them with peace, passion and happiness.

Nature allows us to let go of a lot of the negative patterns that hold us back from living a self-actualized life. Through nature, people connect with their true role in life and they become very passionate about offering their gifts to the world. They discover a source of tremendous creativity inside them and become leaders for an abundant, healthy future with our planet. They are connected to something bigger than themselves.

By practising presence and following our curiosity in the wild places around us, we learn about our place in the world and we reconnect with our roots. People care for the things to which they are connected. If a mother is connected to her baby, she will love and protect her child with a ferocious passion. If we connect with nature, we will naturally care for our environment in a healthy way.

For all the benefits of health, happiness and a sense of connection to what you can do for the world, try to remember to take your daily dose of nature connection. And let’s leave the earth better than we found it.

Brian Mertins offers a four-month-long nature connection mentorship through the Eagle Awareness School (eagleawareness.org) that can be started at anytime and done from anywhere. He can be reached at [email protected].

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