How to relax in order to rest? Surrounded by nature

Giving up contact with nature, we lose our freedom – warns philosopher Marcin Fabjański. He suggests how to develop in ourselves the sensitivity to nature and what kind of closeness with it brings us the most benefit.

Recently we have heard about many new trends in which nature plays the main role. Where does this contemporary turn towards nature come from?
We have been connected to nature since the beginning of man as a species. I look at what is happening now not as something new, some discovery, but as a return. We can only wonder why we have to go back to something that is so obvious.

According to scientists, the 1950s marked the beginning of the Anthropocene, a new geological era characterized by the devastating impact of humans on the Earth. Is that when we turned our backs on nature?
It happened much earlier. When we look at how our history has unfolded, we can see that there has always been a tension and there has always been a conflict between what we might collectively call naturalism and personalism, which places individuals above nature. Elements of detachment from nature can be seen as early as the beginning of our civilization, for example in Plato’s philosophy. Then there were several more events that gradually moved us away from nature. One of them is the birth of Christianity which, feeding on Plato, created the concept of an independent soul. And for it, the game of happiness takes place not only in nature, but also in some story taking place in another world. It is hard to expect a cultural formation that has taken such a view as basic to live in harmony with nature. Within Christian philosophy we also have St. Francis, who saw the unity of man and nature, but he is an exception. Then there was Descartes, who divided the world into a thinking substance, or human being, and a tensile substance: trees, flowers, night, day, sun or shadow. According to the modern philosophy he initiated, not only does the thinking substance not come into contact with the tensile substance at all, it does not even come into contact with the body. And so we have modern man with technology that has completely cut him off from natural processes. Fortunately, we have figured out that because we have gotten so far away from nature, we will not survive as a civilization. And that’s probably where the comeback comes from.

Are we going back out of fear?
It’s the best teacher.

I feel that our relationship to nature also depends on how old we are. Early childhood and late adulthood are the two periods when we are probably most open to nature.
We are closest to nature when we are not interested in conquering the world, but are in a state of fascination with it. A child can give himself fully to it because he has the comfort of being protected for the first years of his life. Then it gets sucked in by the education system, which kills this fascination. She begins to conquer the world, the hearts of her peers and the job market. Until it realizes that this expansion is not a source of happiness. Conquests cease to be attractive. Sometimes it happens at an older age, but not necessarily – for example, environmentalists are recruited mainly from young people. And that’s good, because young people have more energy to, let’s say, spend weeks blocking logging in the Białowieża Forest.

Do you think some of us have more natural intelligence, the ability to tune into nature?
I call it “open source intelligence”, which comes from being fully connected to the environment. It is expressed, for example, in the dams built by beavers. I used to wonder how they know how to carry out such a complicated project, how they can predict when the river will rise and when it will dry up. But if we observe these beavers, we understand that their intelligence comes from coexistence with the environment. It comes from the outside, it is the result of interaction with nature. If we send beavers to Mars – let’s assume that they would have there something to breathe – they would become completely stupid there, because Mars is not their natural environment. After a few generations they would probably develop the intelligence of the new environment, but then they would no longer be beavers.

Can we develop this open source intelligence in ourselves?
Of course. Man has a huge potential, but he is trained in a different direction and therefore he loses this intelligence. Developing it means learning to pay attention to nature in a certain way. The point is to become interested in the course of various processes that take place in it, but not in order to use them for some purpose, but to be present. It is also necessary to change the hierarchy of values. Now at the top of it for most of us are people, especially those who can give us something. Animals, if they are somewhere higher, are mostly in the role of Facebook pets, and plants are very low. They are some sort of mediocre entity. The point is not to put nature at the top of the new hierarchy, but to notice it at all. To understand that life on our planet is based on coexistence.

How does one rebuild such a hierarchy?
Through reflection, introspection, reading, exposing one’s body to nature and observing what happens afterwards. In the Apennine School of Living Philosophy, we find various historical gems and try to look at the world in a way that great thinkers did. Leonardo da Vinci thought of the planet as a living organism. Water was its blood, earth was its muscles, and mountain ranges were its bones. Based on medieval meditation treatises, I designed a series of exercises devoted to the four elements: water, earth, fire and air. The most interesting for me from the pedagogical perspective is water – a very good mediator between us and the environment. Its observation is able to make us calmer, more patient, more gentle.

For me, watching water is mostly associated with sitting by the sea and watching the waves.
It is something completely different. When we sit by the sea and watch the waves crashing on the shore, we are all the time in the world of concepts: the beach, us, the sea, and the individual waves. Whereas our exercise is to follow the element of water in the body. According to these treatises, it has different qualities: fluidity, humidity, gentleness, adaptability or binding – sand, for example. These are what we look for in the body – fluidity under the tongue or around the eyeball. It’s all about attention, learning a certain sensation. We scan the whole body and discover our hydro territory. This allows you to get inner peace after only two minutes if you do the exercise correctly. For elemental meditation, we also go to a waterfall. We sit in a place where water particles are floating. We observe how this moist air affects our skin. At some point it occurs to us that the water outside and inside us are the same thing. There is a strong sense of coexistence with the landscape. We do the same with other elements. For example, fire is associated with heat and cold, air with pressure, and earth with softness and hardness…

What do we lose by giving up contact with nature?
To say that we “lose something” is far too delicate.

How about “we cut off a piece of ourselves”?
If I assume that the “me” is the one who sits behind a desk for 10 or 12 hours and only sometimes has contact with nature, then from this perspective we can talk about cutting off a piece of ourselves. But in my view, the “me” is the one who is part of the natural process of life – and from that point of view, we are not so much cutting off a piece of ourselves as we are becoming a pathology. We are getting dumber and dumber. We are losing our freedom. Young people who spend hours staring at a screen are driving themselves up a blind alley. Everything is going in the direction of controlling people with a single button. Imagine giving the slogan “Go, kill!” to a person who is embedded in nature and a kid who stares at a screen for hours. Who will be more resistant to the influence?

Do we have any chance of a real return to nature?
I know it would be best to say, “Dear readers, meditate 10 minutes a day and breathe deeply and you will lead a happy life,” but unfortunately, there are no simple solutions or easy choices. Usually it takes an impulse to wake up, sometimes a tragedy that strips us of the illusion that we can accumulate happiness by accumulating objects, being above others, gaining power. It’s worth doing such an experiment: questioning known truths, saying “I know nothing” and looking at life with fresh eyes. To think about the reasons behind our actions and the choices we make mechanically. To think about the consequences for us, nature, other people, our children. There is always an opportunity to reorganize life. You can consciously increase your contact with nature: go out of town, choose a route to work that leads through a park, even if it would be faster to take the concrete street.

Scientists have studied that nature has a good effect on us, not only when we are in the woods, but also when we are gardening or even looking at a painted landscape.
This influence is most beneficial, however, when we are in nature and have no tasks to perform. When nature is not a means to any end for us. That’s according to research on flow, or the flow state.

And growing plants? After all, we can take care of a plant, watch it grow, study it.
It all depends on the approach, because I can grow plants to sell them, and I can grow them to observe different processes and our relationship with each other. Just as I can go to the forest to run and build ego or to contemplate nature. I believe that the less interference with nature, the better. A forest planted by man will teach us little about the process of life. A wilderness is a different matter. In it we witness a constant transformation. Sprouts are growing out of rotting trees, and it is impossible to tell which parts are young and which are old.

How do you try to get closer to nature?
I moved out of the city, I try to get out of the capitalist system as much as possible. I stopped flying to Asia because I know how air transport harms our planet. I try not to work too hard.

Do you see any change in yourself?
I definitely do. I have more sensitivity, I see details, I feel stimuli more intensely, I have better intuition. In the past, when I was walking in the forest, my head was full of thoughts. Today I am focused on noticing.

A source of nature deficit

This is a term coined by journalist and reporter Richard Louv as a name for a disorder that occurs when people – especially children – spend too little time outdoors. The lack of contact with nature causes physical and psychological problems, including anxiety and distraction. Among the most common consequences are:

diseases of civilization resulting from lack of exercise and improper diet, appearing at increasingly earlier stages of life;
difficulty concentrating attention;
loss of ability to cope in conditions different from those artificially created by civilization;
chronic stress, which we are unable to relieve in a healthy way, falling into workaholism, addictions and mental disorders;
reduced creativity and productivity.