Hello friends,
Welcome to my newsletter, People Ecology Place, where I explore how ecology weaves through our daily lives and the places we live in.
This week I’m thinking about what environmental awareness really means, and how we can cultivate greater awareness right where we live.
I grew up with the ethos that the sky is the limit. Modern schooling prepared me for modern striving, the sacrosanct idea in our culture that individual achievements are everything and that relentless effort is how to get “there.”
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from a lifetime of gardening, it’s that the world moves forward at its own pace, and it is a pace that honors the material reality of right here, right now.
If I rush the act of planting a batch of seeds, for example, I’ll be careless and the seeds will end up in the wrong spot in the seed tray or pushed too deep in the soil, inevitably holding those seeds back from growing to their fullest potential.
The same goes for the seasons. I wait all winter for spring, in anticipation of the chance to plant what I’ve been dreaming of through those long cold months. How slow those long winter months drag on in waiting and anticipation. But when springtime comes, there is so much to do all at once, I can hardly keep up with all the work that needs to be done. (True to its name, springtime uncoils like a wound up spring).
Of course, there’s wisdom to be found here - the wisdom of cultivating patience. And you can see this wisdom in long-time gardeners. But perhaps more than this wise patience, long-time gardeners have the ability to pay attention - to expand awareness beyond the immediate want, to build intuitive understanding of the quality of the sunlight, the temperature of the air, the timing of the emergence of insects into the garden. This is a deep knowledge - it’s knowing where you are.
That’s the core message of this first official newsletter: Seeing the wisdom in slowing down and paying attention to the world around you, building awareness and starting right where you are.
Thank you for reading!
AWARENESS IS SLOWING DOWN
So let’s talk about awareness. The modern environmental movement focuses on raising public awareness about the major global issues of our day. And we’re making headway on spreading that message, right? Talk of cascading global catastrophes and debates over the "best" climate actions has become more mainstream.
But there’s an ironic twist: coinciding with increasing chatter about global environmental concerns, the movement is plagued by a distinct lack of awareness of the ecological conditions - and environmental threats - in our own backyards.
It reflects a modern bias for locating our problems, and the proposed solutions, as being "out there," with a blindness to how we might instead start right here, right where we are.
I'm reminded of my involvement in the gardens at my kids' school. Started by native plant enthusiasts with a love for wildlife gardening, the natural gardens can sometimes be overwhelming to take care of - and our small school relies only on parent volunteers to keep up with the gardens.
While many parents at our school care deeply about the globalized issue of “supporting biodiversity” - they don’t know what it looks like to support biodiversity right here at home. When they look at this land that has been carefully cultivated to support local wildlife, the wildlife benefits don’t register in their minds. They are used to landscaping that looks more simplified and orderly. They might also think that supporting biodiversity is something that happens somewhere else.
If we slow down and look more closely we can see the birds that find refuge here. If we slow down and look more closely we can see the monarch butterflies that lay eggs on our milkweed. If we slow down and look more closely we can see the endless opportunities for the children to learn about the biodiversity that blossoms in these wild gardens right outside the schoolhouse doors.
The dream of my life
Is to lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees—
To learn something by being nothing
A little while
but the rich
Lens of attention.
— Mary Oliver, Entering the Kingdom
AWARENESS IS ATTENTION
Awareness is the state of being conscious - awake to our senses and open to perceive one’s own surroundings. How do we know and perceive what’s going on around us? We observe, we listen, we notice. Awareness means widening and opening our lens of attention.
Seen through this light, awareness-raising, as it currently happens through the modern environmental movement, isn’t really about honing awareness at all, since it does not involve direct observation nor noticing what’s around us. In some ways it’s the exact opposite - it is throwing information out there in the hope that enough people will listen and be open to receiving what’s being shared - and then to magically know what to do about it.
But we already live in a world of endless information. We swim in it, we breathe it, we are overwhelmed by it. In fact, the information overload dulls our awareness rather than strengthening it. As we are inundated with more and more information, the words carry less and less meaning. At the same time, so much of the information, filled with doom and hopelessness, causes us grief and anxiety, which serves to further dull our senses and weaken our perceptive powers. We want to run away and hide from it.
Like Mary Oliver writes, we need to “be nothing” but the attention we give. This is the crux of the issue isn’t it? In our status-obsessed society, everyone wants to be “something.” But we need to be nothing to really pay attention. We need to set aside our egos and thinking brain so we can recover our senses and remember to hear, to feel, to smell.
This is how we can begin to really see what’s going on in the natural world around us. We need to leave the disembodied ego behind so that we can stop “raising awareness” in the abstract and start bringing awareness to our bodily experience of place.
EXPANDING SENSORY AWARENESS AT HOME, A PRACTICE
One of the core tenets of nature connection is to learn to notice everything that comes into our senses. We can do this in a variety of ways at home. When we practice this sensory awareness regularly, we build our muscles for getting out of our head and into the embodied reality of direct experience.
This can be a sitting or a moving practice. If you’d prefer to sit, you can find a place to sit somewhere outside at your home. Locate a comfortable place, a place you like to be or a place that sparks your curiosity. Notice the sounds that come to your ears, the sensations on your skin, the quality of the sunlight and shadows. Focus on these sounds, sensations, and qualities without regard to what they are or what is causing them. Just experience them as they are.
Practice sitting here at least five minutes a day. You can sit at the same time each day and notice what changes from day to day. Or you can sit at a different time each day and notice how the sensory experience is different depending on the time of day.
Alternatively, if you prefer to move, you can take off your shoes and walk through your outdoor place slowly, still noticing what you see and hear, and the sensations on your skin, including the soles of your feet.
PHENOLOGY - NOTICING THE LIFE OF YOUR BIOREGION
With a regular practice of sensory awareness, you expand your attention to the daily comings and goings of birds and insects, sunlight and breezes, and the blooming and leafing out of plants. With a regular practice of paying attention, one starts to discern the patterns and rhythms of how these phenomena unfold throughout the day and throughout the seasons. This is called phenology - the study of these patterns and how they emerge through the interrelationships between all life in a given bioregion.
As we pay attention to these interrelationships and the timing of how nature’s phenomena unfolds over time, we develop a much deeper intuitive sense for when these patterns are disrupted and how to ultimately heal this damage. For example, phenology of my bioregion shows that the blooming of the dogwoods co-occurs with the first of the last two cold spells in the spring; the blooming of the blackberries co-occurs with the second and final cold spell.
How magical to learn these patterns from wise observers in your own community and to study these phenomena yourself so that you develop your own intuitive awareness. You can build this awareness through your own practice of observation and recording what you learn in a nature journal over time. Why don’t you give it a try?