When Neurobiology and Culture Conflict: Finding Our Way From Here

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Larry Glover

Enhancing Resiliency Through Nature: Part 2

When Neurobiology and Culture Conflict: Finding Our Way From Here

We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.
— Anaïs Nin

Richard Louv, in his groundbreaking book, Last Child in the Woods, tells the story of a fourth-grade boy. The boy tells him, “I like to play indoors better, ‘cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”

Louv coined the term ‘nature deficit disorder’ to describe this disconnection we are experiencing from the natural world. The famed biologist, Edward O. Wilson, borrowed the term biophilia from Eric Fromm and extended its reference from the innate ‘love of life’ to include ‘our unconscious affinity for connection with nature’. What we now know however is that this love of ‘all’ life is developmentally hinged.

If children are not exposed to forest and stream, to frog and toad while their neurological system is yet developing, they biologically will not develop the capacity to hear and find pleasure in Robin’s song or to stop and fascinate in the fluttering Monarch’s golden beauty. This evolving loss of sensory sensitivity and orientation is a reflection of what demands or screams for attention from us (a TV or video game) verses what invites a deeper attention and perhaps subtler listening, perceiving and reflecting (i.e. noticing the concentric ripples evoked on a quiet pond of water by a pebble thrown in.)

“Attention is the holy grail,” as one brain researcher reported on in Part I said. And nature-deprived children are attentionally undeveloped and likely evolve into environmentally miss-oriented business people, politicians, teachers and parents who cannot see the world of nature in front of their eyes. They become like the New World natives captured in Jane Hirshfield’s poem, Global Warming, from her book, After:

When his ship first came to Australia,
Cook wrote, the natives
Continued fishing, without looking up.
Unable, it seems, to fear what was too large to be comprehended.

The point here is not to blame or accuse but to seek understanding and to see what is, without flinching. We are incapable of attending to that which has no place in our identity, our worldview; nature deficit disorder is also ‘nature attention disorder’, or we might call it, ‘nature identity disorder’.

Children who lack playful interaction with the natural world do not learn to identify their own ‘self’ with it, as also being forest and mountain and desert and river and frog and bear and butterfly. They will not learn to perceive and appreciate that the self and the world are woven not of things but of relationships, that they too are ecological landscapes, that even their own body is sustained by the ecological wonder of intelligent and communicating bacteria.

A world of humans without a self-identification that extends into the other than human realms is an unsustainable world. It will lack the ability to pay attention to the very relationships that ultimately sustain it. It will not know the health of its children is inseparable from the health of its soils and forests and waters, for example, and so through nature attention disorder it will sow the seeds of its own collapse.

The early psychologist, William James, reminds us:

“Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.”

The emerging and controversial science of Neurological Marketing not only confirms James’ sentiment but also now knows how to use your own neurobiology against both you and your unwitting child. They want the attentional real estate of your brain, of our brains.

And the sophistication of brain imagining now allows for marketing researchers to watch what areas of your brain light up as you watch a TV commercial or as a child stares into the screen. And when they can align the sought for neurological sweet spot of the Virgin Mary with patriotic fervor and national pride and family loyalty and images of beauty in nature, all in association with their product and brand, it’s “Bingo!” time: “Loyalty through brain mapping….”

“The things we make, make us” however, and we are ever becoming the self-referential creators our own creation: creatures that have forgotten where we come from and so cannot see where we are going. The brain that is unaware of the neurological onslaught of marketing manipulation actively seeking its attention will have little to no defense against the same.

The distance between the forth-grade boy playing indoors, because that is where the electrical outlets are, and the adult who believes he is playing outdoors by driving his SUV through an old growth forest, have become but a virtual Madison Avenue synapse apart.

This is a loss of orientation, and thus too a loss of knowing where and even who we are: beings of wonder and mystery and of inter-connectivity with all life on the planet, creatures who are yet living the ongoing adventure of a cosmos yet emerging out of the womb of Being and Becoming.

Navigating from here: restoring our birthright

“You are never lost if you don’t care where you are.”— Unknown

Fortunately we all come with an onboard GPS system built in: our potential affinity and attunement to nature, our developmental capacity to pay an indigenous kind of attention to the natural world. These potentials for attunement are dramatically revealed in the ancient Polynesian’s skills for ‘wayfinding.’ Their watery environment so extended into their somatic self-referencing, as home and as self, that they accurately navigated tiny canoes within a vast ocean world containing but a dotting of rare and isolated islands. National Geographic Explorer in Residence Wade Davis writes:

The science and art of navigation is holistic. The navigator must process an endless flow of data, intuitions and insights derived from observation and the dynamic rhythms and interactions of wind, waves, clouds, stars, sun, moon, the flight of birds, a bed of kelp, the glow of phosphorescence on a shallow reef—in short, the constantly changing world of weather and the sea.

What is even more astonishing is that the entire science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got to where you are. pg. 60 (italics mine)

Davis also tells the story of the legendary master Polynesian navigator Mau Piailug, who during his own training as a child of eight became sea sick.

“…his teacher’s solution was to tie him to a rope and drag him behind the canoe until the nausea passed. As a young man of fourteen he tied his testicles to the rigging of the vessel to more carefully sense the movement of the canoe through the water. …It was said he could conjure islands out of he sea just by holding a vision of them in his imagination. pg. 53 (italics mine)

We now know our canoe and Ark to be Earth itself, soaring in space it seems amidst the great ocean of the Milky Way Galaxy. And our own future is equally tied to our willingness and ability to read the turbulent currents of our times, to come into harmony, attunement and a deep relationship with nature—as self. As we explored in Part I, neurobiological research confirms that this “Green Brain” is smarter and more creative than it would be absent of time spent in the out of doors and in natural settings.

When we know the health, vitality and resilience of our water and air and soil, of all our non-human relations, is also ultimately that of our own, only then shall we also be on the path of reclaiming the resilience of nature as our own.

Make no mistake: we are evolving, or de-evolving as some argue. But how are we unconsciously shaping ourselves into who we will become? And what of our children who may never know the sound of a wolf howling in the wild, or the sight and feel of a horned toad in their hand, or of their whole body opening into the experience of speechless awe at the sight of a bejeweled starry night sky?

A question of story:

If you don’t know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don’t know the stories you may be lost in life. —Siberian Elder

“We are more like the forest than we are different.” This is a phrase my clients come to integrate, whether we are working outdoors or inside modern weather controlled conference rooms. “We are more like the rivers and all of nature than we are different.”

It turns out the modern sciences are confirming this ancient bit of wisdom, wisdom I claim no originality for, though still, for me it was a life transforming personal discovery. It was for me the discovery of a new story of belonging and of connectivity; therein is a hope that is deeper and more engaging than any repetitive depressing news today’s headlines might report.

This is a story of identity that can be rewritten in each of our spirits, minds and bodies as we come to experience and know and identify our self—with Life itself, with nature. Inherent within this new-yet-ancient story is a biognosis, the moist intimate wisdom-knowledge of Life, of our place within it. It is a story that each of us must claim for ourselves if we are to know and embody the birthright of our own belonging and the resiliency of nature as our own.

Each new year is a surprise to us.
We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird,
and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream,
reminding us of a previous state of existence…
— Henry David Thoreau

Coming in Part III, Enhancing Resiliency Through Nature: The Four Faces of Attention and Resilience — and Why You Care

Coming in Part IV, Enhancing Resiliency Through Nature: Strategies and Practices for a Resilience of Thrivability

Additional Resource Links:

GROW OUTSIDE! Richard Louv’s Keynote Address to the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference

View the Richard Louv interview on the TODAY show, in their segment on Nature Deficit Disorder, bottom of the page.

Resource Guide : Here are some helpful resources for parents, teachers, and community leaders to help encourage children in their enjoyment of the great outdoors.

Posted in 1 The River of Life — The Art of Living, 3 The Power of Arrival, 4 The Ecological Self, Deep Ecology, Indigenous Science/Wisdom, Inspirations & Strategies from Nature, Navigating the Narrows, Personal Resiliency, Poetry of Resiliency, Self-Change, Thrivability | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Science and Varieties of Gratitude

Posted on November 25, 2010 by Larry Glover

“I’ve tried gratitude,” a coaching client recently told me. “And it didn’t work. Nothing changed in my life.”

I was reminded of the way I learned to pray to God as a child. We would have denied it had anyone challenged it as such, but from where I am now, yes, we were always trying to make bargains with our God. It was a kind of petitionary prayer in which we sought either 1) our salvation in exchange for our human love and loyalty, 2) the forgiveness of our frail humanity (sins) in exchange for our renewed loyalty, 3) or some other kind of, “Please God, if you’ll just… I’ll….”

Likewise, my client was attempting to change her life by practicing what gratitude researcher and Psychologist Robert Emmons might call ‘a warm and fuzzy’ approach. She had not yet committed herself to a lifestyle of gratitude, to the intellectually demanding and heart opening receiving of gratitude, come what may. To receive gratitude into one’s life in this way is not, from my perspective, not so much  ‘giving’ gratitude as it is a courageous willingness to perceive life from a spirit of ‘thankfulness’, no matter what.

Below is an excerpt from a recent article on research out of UC Davis: Why gratitude isn’t for wimps.

“We always find the same thing,” he says. “People who keep gratitude journals improve their quality of life.”

Emmons says his 10 strategies can help anyone cultivate a more grateful approach to life. But he warns that the exercises are not for the “intellectually lethargic.” And he stresses that gratitude is incompatible with feelings of victimhood or entitlement, or with the inability to recognize one’s shortcomings or to admit one is not self-sufficient.

“Far from being a warm, fuzzy sentiment, gratitude is morally and intellectually demanding,” he says. “It requires contemplation, reflection, and discipline. It can be hard and painful work.”

Here are Emmons’ evidence-based prescriptions for becoming more grateful:

  • Keep a gratitude journal. Write down and record what you are grateful for, and then when you need to reaffirm your good lot in life, look back on the journal.
  • Remember the bad. If you do not remind yourself of what it was like to be sick, unemployed, or heartbroken, you will be less likely to appreciate health, your job, or your relationship.
  • Ask yourself three questions every evening. Fill in the blanks with the name of a person (or persons) in your life. What have I received from ___? What have I given to ___? What troubles and difficulty have I caused ___?
  • Learn prayers of gratitude. One Emmons suggests in his book from the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh: Waking up this morning, I see the blue sky. I join my hands in thanks; for the many wonders of life; for having 24 brand-new hours before me.
  • Appreciate your senses. One approach: Practice breathing exercises.
  • Use visual reminders. For example, Emmons has a refrigerator magnet in his home bearing this quote from Eleanor Roosevelt: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery … today is a gift.”
  • Make a vow to practice gratitude. “Swearing a vow to perform a behavior actually does increase the likelihood that the action will be executed,” the psychologist notes.
  • Watch your language: It influences how you think about the world.
  • Go through the motions. Research shows that emotions can follow behavior.
  • Be creative. Look for new situations and opportunities in which to feel grateful, especially when things are not going well.

And my coaching client? Yes, she is changing her life. She inspires me with the persistence and courage she brings to a desperate situation. She is learning, as am I, to let a radical spirit of gratitude into our lives. We are learning that gratitude is a transformational form of love and that intentionally inviting and letting it in, however we are able… is to let in the gift of life, come what may.

This is the radical “Yes!” Life invites us into.

Where does gratitude come easy to you in life? Go there.

Where in life do you have to reach to find gratitude? Go there too, and dig deep.

Posted in 1 The River of Life — The Art of Living, Eco/Positive/Depth Psychology, Personal Resiliency, Resiliency, Resources, Science | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Great Forgetting — Who Are We Anyway?

Posted on November 11, 2010 by Larry Glover

The Great Forgetting
by Calvin Luther Martin

I find the elements of beautiful writing to include crispness, clarity and brevity of language; and it must be provocative in some way. It must emote a passion of thinking or feeling that capture my attention and spiral me deeper into Life, into my own being.

A new book, The Great Forgetting by Calvin Luther Martin, accomplishes all these. Each sentence is potent with power and is presented in a beautiful artistic format that supports the drive of the writing.

I call it a book and it is. It was however, originally published as the foreword to another book, Elephants on the Edge: What Elephants Teach Us about Humanity (Yale University Press, 2009). K-Selected Books has taken Martin’s worthy hymn of thinking and repackaged it as a powerful and artfully designed little book.

I first encountered Martin’s writing in his book, The Way of the Human Being (Yale University Press, 1999). That reading of years ago led me enthusiastically to agree to review a copy of The Great Forgetting. This question, of “What is it to be human?” runs through both books and is as critical to and as shaping of our future as is the question, “Who am I?”

Our responses to these questions weave themselves into the personal and collective stories of our lives like threads weaving the garments of identity we wear into the world. The threads of these potent stories thus clothe even our worldviews of the cosmos, our perceptions of the house finch at the water dish and also of our very self. We unconsciously, for the most part, hang our identities upon the answering of these questions.

Yet it is this question of identity that Martin continues to write to in this new book, not toward an answer of resolution but toward a mystery worth living into: What does it mean to be human?

Are we truly the apex of evolution and cosmic intelligence? Is our highest identity ruling the beasts of the field and fowl of the air for our own pleasures? Calvin answers with an echoing and haunting, “No!” In so doing he invites us to consider breakdowns or turning points in the lives of greats such as Nietzsche, Descartes, Jung, Melville, Thoreau, Faulkner and even Jesus. Like Moses before them, encountering a burning bush in the desert and discovering he already stood on holy ground, each of these too were changed and responded in their own way to an encounter with mystery, with primal ‘First World’ life forces.

Only after a primal encounter, lasting 40 days and nights in the desert alone, did Jesus say, “I and the Father are one.”

I, and Life are…one! For this heretical story of identity Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, so the telling goes. Such a story and identity were theological and cultural blasphemy. His words announced him as ‘undomesticated’. Yes, he was Wild!

And who can say where such wildness might lead if left unchecked? Yet is not this identity of oneness with Life also the very thread woven into the mythologies and worldviews of indigenous people throughout the world? Is it not also the thread from which the world’s wisdom traditions and now even modern science are woven?

And still, even in our modern civilized era, to touch such wildness as this is to be changed. Forever. It is, as Thoreau and Martin describe it: “Contact!”

Martin’s own “inevitable” contact, his “breakdown” or “crackup”, the dissolution of a civilized or a prescribed and domesticated identity, occurred through an encounter with a deeper, cleaner, stronger, more primal and ancient identity than his own. It came through the simple passing of a note from an Yup’ik Eskimo man in a prison in Alaska, and it is a story best left to Martin’s telling.

My own inevitable crackups arrived to a self too small and rigid; Life demanded that I loosen my hold on a constricted human identity and embrace instead an identity at one with all of Life. They were each a death and a birth and each a cairn on a spiraling decent into embracing the beasts and the gods within as who… yes, as who I am too.

This is not the civilized ‘I’. It is not the identity culture pays us to cultivate that we might become proper patriotic consumers. No. In fact, renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow tells us, “What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.”

Interestingly, organizational consultants Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers write of the nature of systems change in A Simpler Way: “A self changes when it changes its consciousness of itself…. It is essential to remember that all change originates when we change our awareness of who we are.”

Correspondingly, the emerging field of Restoration Ecology tells us that if we want to help restore an ecosystem to health, the principle is to help it reconnect to its ‘wholeness’. Thus we restore fire to western forests and grasslands and wolves to Yellowstone and…. In essence we work at the level of identity, reconnecting a diminished self to more of its ‘wholeness.’

This is the drive I read in Martin’s writing, in The Great Forgetting. There, in meditative brevity he provocatively invites us to consider and witness what it is to be human, fully and wholly human, absent the wall of separation from Life. He is playing with our identity, with our awareness of what it means to be human. He would have us remember our wholeness, to live into its unanswerable mystery.

Read it at your own risk. And read it again, and again. It is the kind of participatory reading that deepens with each contact. Give it as a gift to yourself, or a loved one.

Posted in 4 The Ecological Self, Deep Ecology, Eco/Positive/Depth Psychology, Indigenous Science/Wisdom, Inspirations & Strategies from Nature, Memes, Resources | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Music as ‘religion of resilience’

Posted on November 8, 2010 by Larry Glover

Below is the “Official Trailer for new documentary short about the oldest Holocaust survivor in the world, Alice Herz-Sommer.” At 106, it was and is her love of music that ‘carries her through.’ Her resilience is palpable.

“Music is my religion… Music is God… Hatred breeds only hatred. When you look at the good side of life, everybody loves you. When we are so old… only… are we aware of the beauty of life.”

You can learn more about her here: Alice Dancing Under the Gallows

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The Texas Rangers’ Misunderstanding of Resiliency

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Larry Glover

The Texas Rangers’ misunderstanding of resiliency may cost them the world series. They are down 3 to 1 as I write this.

The AP came out with a story a couple of days ago titled, Rangers Resiliency Being Tested at World Series.

ARLINGTON, Texas – Michael Young insists the Texas Rangers don’t even talk about resiliency.

“You just have it or you don’t,” Young said Friday. “We have it.”

Now they have to show how resilient they can really be. Or the first World Series in the franchise’s 50 seasons could be over in a hurry….

Now the first thing we ought to note here is that I am NOT a TV sports fan. One colleague I used to travel with a lot joked that he had to teach me how to respond with the phrase, “What a game,” so he could carry on sports conversations with me, no matter the season.

The misunderstanding of resiliency conveyed in the above snippet from the AP story is that, “You either have it or you don’t.” Begging to differ, I suggest we are all born with it; and we can choose to cultivate a relationship with Life that nurtures a vital and vigorous resilience.

Are the Rangers consciously cultivating their resilience? That might be another story, and probably not as much as they might if they “don’t even talk about it.”

The story continues however and demonstrates some positive resiliency characteristics:

“What’s made us so resilient is these guys have been good at dealing with what is presented to them day to day,” manager Ron Washington said. “The key is to make sure that you stay in the moment and just continue to try to do what you’re capable of doing.”…

“We’re resilient because we’ve been through so much,” C.J. Wilson said…. [emphasis mine]

Research confirms that facing life challenges and adversity creates more resilient people, than those ‘who have it easy.’ And learning to ‘stay in the moment’ is certainly a life skill. As the Native American saying goes, “It’s the hard times that grow strong trees.” At least the hard times give us the opportunity to ‘grow strong.’

“We’ve bounced back a lot of times during the season,” Kinsler said. “We’ve had a lot of injuries. We’ve had guys constantly pick each other up. We’ve had different people play well at different times during the season and basically not carry the team, but be a force in the lineup. Right now, we need to do that.”…

Unfortunately, “bouncing back” is not the same thing as learning. Rubber balls bounce; people can change their trajectory with choice and mindfulness. A conscious approach to one’s resilience can move us beyond the ‘bounce back’ variety of resilience.

…”That’s the key to focus on in Game 3 – to play our best baseball and see what happens. If we win or lose playing our best baseball, I think we can stomach that a lot better.”

And yes, playing Life to one’s best is the key to so much in living.

One thing, among several, the Ranger might do to cultivate their resilience is to train for emotional intelligence. Managing the individual and collective emotional environment is critical to tonight’s performance. Positive emotional management is a skill set that we can all learn.

A second strategy to strengthen any individual or team’s resilience is Mindfulness training. As Dr. Daniel Siegel writes in Mindsight, research finds that:

“…people with mindful awareness training have a shift in their brains toward an “approach state” that allows them to move toward rather than away from challenging situations. This is the brain signature of resilience.”

Two simple and yet profound strategies to increase the resiliency of any team or person. It’s not too late for the Rangers, me, or you. What challenge might you require courage to move toward, to approach? Where might you find the meaning that would give you that courage.

Posted in 1 The River of Life — The Art of Living, 3 The Power of Arrival, Dimensions of Resilience, Emotional Intelligence, Events, Leadership, Models of Resilience, Personal Resiliency, Resiliency, Varieties of Resilience | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Oh this heart…

Posted on October 23, 2010 by Larry Glover

Oh this heart of mine
this heart
shared by you too
she can be such a lonely hunter
looking for love as they say
in all the wrong places
as though something
inside
lived out in the rough of a wild world
a world incapable of giving to a self
that will not first open
and ever so vulnerably tenderly
courageously receive
from its own Being
that wholeness that love
it most desires
—lg

Below is Dr. Brené Brown, story teller and “researcher at the University of Houston,” speaking of the human heart with insight and humor and brilliance. More from her later, meanwhile, should you by chance ever have experienced shame or loneliness, God forbid, sit down and watch. Listen. Let her heart speak to yours. And then perhaps watch and listen again.

“Connection is why we are here. It is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.”

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Dr. Brené Brown is a researcher professor at the University of Houston, Graduate College of Social Work, where she has spent the past ten years studying a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness, posing the questions: How do we engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to embrace our imperfections and to recognize that we are enough — that we are worthy of love, belonging and joy? Brené is the author of I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Telling the Truth About Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power (2007) and the forthcoming books, The Gifts of Imperfection (2010) and Wholehearted: Spiritual Adventures in Falling Apart, Growing Up, and Finding Joy ( 2011). Here is a link for her Amazon site.

And here is a link from an earlier post on this blog: Loneliness & Presence: What the Aspen Know

Posted in 1 The River of Life — The Art of Living, 3 The Power of Arrival, Eco/Positive/Depth Psychology, Emotional Intelligence, Organizational Resilience, People, Resiliency, Resources, Self-Change | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Enhancing Resiliency Through Nature: Part 1

Posted on October 10, 2010 by Larry Glover

Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better. — Albert Einstein

“Sometimes a tree tells you more than you can read in books.” — C.G. Jung

It’s all about attention:

“Attention is the holy grail,” a recent New York Times article quotes psychologist and researcher David Strayer from the University of Utah. The article is a story about brain researchers rafting the San Juan River in UT in order to experientially explore the effects of “logging off” and time spent in nature. Some job!

The NYT article, Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain, continues:

“Everything that you’re conscious of, everything you let in, everything you remember and you forget, depends on it.” [attention]

“Echoing other researchers, Mr. Strayer says that understanding how attention works could help in the treatment of a host of maladies, like attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia and depression. And he says that on a day-to-day basis, too much digital stimulation can “take people who would be functioning O.K. and put them in a range where they’re not psychologically healthy.”

The neurology of being outdoors:

“Nature’s tranquility helps brain connect,” is the summation of recent research published in the journal Neuroimage and reported by Futurity.org.

“The findings demonstrate that tranquil environmental scenes containing natural features, such as the sea, cause distinct brain areas to become ‘connected’ with one another while man-made environments, such as motorways, disrupt the brain connections.”

… “People experience tranquility as a state of calmness and reflection, which is restorative compared with the stressful effects of sustained attention in day-to-day life, says Michael Hunter, from the department of neuroscience at Sheffield University.

This line of research is not in itself new, and some might argue is but confirmation of common sense. What is new is our capacity to image the brain and externally monitor the body during such “outdoor experiences.” What is also new is a more conscious application of this knowledge in settings from education to business to health care, from garden design to the presence of living plants in the board and classroom.

Health care may be leading the way; business and education interests will do well to pay attention.

“…a growing body of research is showing that exposure to natural environments can improve both the patient experience and health outcomes. …studies…have shown a connection between exposure to nature and improved healing, less medication use, shorter hospitalizations, and decreased anxiety and stress among family members and staff.” (Therapeutic Responses to Natural Environments)

In research reported by the Life Science Foundation, on the difference between taking a walk in an indoor shopping center vs. taking a walk in nature:

•       71%  reported decreased levels of depression after the green walk

•       22%  felt their depression increased after walking through indoor shopping center

•       71%  felt less tense after the green walk

•       50%  felt their tension had increased after shopping center walk

•       90%  had an increase in self-esteem after the green walk

•       44%  said their self-esteem had decreased after window-shopping indoors

It is worth noting at this point that a more highly connected and integrated brain, the… shall we say… ‘green brain,’ is a more creative and resilient brain as well.

Spending time in natural settings is clearly a life-affirming path to strengthening our resilience. Research confirms that as little as 15 or 20 minutes a day can make a significant difference in your life, not only in your sense of vitality but also in your social intelligence. Consider what two, three or more days in a wild setting might do!

“Research has shown that people with a greater sense of vitality don’t just have more energy for things they want to do, they are also more resilient to physical illnesses. One of the pathways to health may be to spend more time in natural settings….” Spending Time in Nature Makes People Feel More Alive, Study Shows

Interesting isn’t it: spending time in nature is good for our health, creativity and resilience. Yet just as the neuroscience is pouring in confirming our need for ‘the wild,’ humanity stands at the precipice of a rapid decline and extinction of this very resource. How will we navigate, where will we find the resilience to navigate what biologists call the sixth great extinction of life on planet Earth?

It is all about attention. Remember?

“In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” — Henry David Thoreau

Note: This and subsequent parts were written in response to conversations with my colleague and friend Tom Wojick of The Renewal Group, and author at the Renewal Group Blog. This post is introduced in his newsletter, The Resiliency Imperative, a resource rich recommendation, which you can sign up for from Tom’s blog.

Posted in 1 The River of Life — The Art of Living, 4 The Ecological Self, Eco/Positive/Depth Psychology, Indigenous Science/Wisdom, Inspirations & Strategies from Nature, Navigating the Narrows, Personal Resiliency, Resiliency, Thrivability | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

One Coffee Shop Lady Told Another…

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Larry Glover

“Life is not safe,”
One coffee-shop lady told another.
And it is true, “No one,” as they say,
“no one gets out alive.”
Still, You are safe.
Not the you that fears
what others might think of you
Not the you that searches
for power or hungers
for more or clings
to ideas and beliefs as if
any of these might be who
you are—your True Self
is so much grander
Even the body you wear, inhabit
is woven of threads of star light
and your bones… are the dust of ancient galaxies
and the water of primeval
seas flows in your blood
and desert springs and cold
clear mountain creeks and
canyon wrens singing in eroded
carved slits in the skin of
the earth itself is your body
Your body the earth’s body
Your Self
Your deep true Self
Arises out of, and is itself
Nothing less than wonder
mystery and awe, the stillness
and the silence
From which you run
The Oneness—the interwoven being-ness
of all that is and that is ‘Not two’
That Self
That you—is perfectly safe.

Posted in 2 Our Ground of Being, 4 The Ecological Self, Cosmology, Deep Ecology, Dimensions of Resilience, Eco/Positive/Depth Psychology, Emotional Intelligence, Indigenous Science/Wisdom, Inspirations & Strategies from Nature, Models of Resilience, Personal Resiliency, Personal Stories, Poetry of Resiliency | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Father’s Lessons on Living and Dying

Posted on August 12, 2010 by Larry Glover

In Amazed Memory of Boyd Cole Glover

1922-2010

“If we know how to live, we will also know how to die. Living in beauty means dying in beauty. The deepest way to be alive and the deepest way to die are the same—doing so in harmony with everyone and everything…. — Thich Nhat Hanh, Foreword to The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth by Joan Halifax

It’s an old story; been going on through all the generations of humankind but tonight it is damn personal. Intimate. This losing of a father can happen to any of us but once.

It can only ever be a singular event in any one of our lives yet who can count the times down through the eons that a ‘father’ has died?

Still, tonight, it is a nakedly intimate story. Today I held my father’s warm hand as it grew cold and offered my relationship with this man I call “Dad,” to the Mystery of Life and Death.

If one of the roles of our parents is to teach us how to live, and how to die, Dad’s story is a complex one. His last real expiration was a sign of relief, a great and beautiful, “Ahhhh….” It was a letting go. A surrender. This came as I knelt at his side, holding his hand, and then my brother Mickey was there behind me and I made space for him to be where I was.

Dad took a couple more short breaths, each interspersed with an eternal silent stillness… and he was gone.

It was all sweet and peaceful in the end.

An older brother’s intuition to visit seemingly created the doorway Dad needed to be able to leave, for his family to gather and be present. Some lessons are worth showing up for.

My relationship with Dad over the years was stormy, as it also was for my three brothers in varying degrees. And now that we face the local preacher’s need to ‘meet with the family,’ I realize neither this preacher’s church nor his theology are large enough to hold Dad’s story. I already regret the countless times at Dad’s service that I’ll have to listen to people tell me yet again a story I’ve heard since I was a child: “Your father was a real man of God, a good man. He loved his Bible….”

I know I’ll let them hold to their beliefs and story of who this man was and listen politely without challenge, for we are all woven of many stories, even contradictory ones. And I know I cannot dispense the redemption they seek through their religious beliefs anymore than Dad found redemption in his.

Yet it is paradoxical that Dad’s story, in the end, is one of return and redemption. It did not begin that way and this ending of transformation and transcendence was not assured; it would not have been predicted by me or any one of his other children.

Boyd Cole Glover was born the son of a man who ran away from home at the vulnerable age of 9. He ran to escape a new step mother who wanted neither him or his brother in the house. Boyd’s father, in effect, had no father; not one who knew how to be a ‘father’ anyway. And then Boyd’s own father, a west Texas horse trader now with a reputation for being a hard man, committed suicide when Boyd was but 19 and a freshman in college.

Boyd, Dad, later responded to the inquiries of his own children about this loss in his life: “I don’t remember feeling anything. He wasn’t around much when I was growing up.”

Still, a man named as “Father,” had just shot himself in the head and lain in a pool of blood on his mother’s bed. Did Boyd not feel anything because he truly had no relationship to the man called, “Dad?”  Or did he not feel anything because he was that emotionally detached from himself?

Regardless of the answer, Boyd soon choose the life of ‘a man of God.’ He became a ‘Fisher of men,’ a preacher, an evangelist. His identity and soul found home between the covers of a worn black leather Bible. He did not exist except as he could find himself between its pages and his life was given to bringing other souls into the fold of salvation.

Problem was that his loins gave this fatherless man the ability to father children while his religion required he ‘beat the devil’ out of them. “I’m going to give you a blistering you won’t forget,” he promised repeatedly. And he did. Learned it from his “One and only true God.”

How many of those do you suppose there might be in the world anyway?

As Joseph Campbell wrote:

“In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Chose yours. The God you worship is the god you deserve.” — A Joseph Campbell Companion

Body serum oozed from the raw flesh of my undeserving butt and was tinged blood red from the judgments of Boyd’s black leather belt. Harder was listening to the man preach about the tortures of everlasting hellfire and brimstone on the same Sunday night, while my white shorts embedded themselves into the forming scab from the press of the hard wooden church pew. And the man preached on forever about how children need to “obey their parents in the lord” the way adults need to obey God.

Boyd’s “One and only true God” came between him and his children. Alienation followed. Hard feelings and more than enough shame to be shared around. Later, when I was in my early twenties, and in a flight of rebellion and righteous furry had fled his church and his God—to our mutually public disgrace, he made a powerful acknowledgment to me.

“I think I spanked you boys to much.” And then to me specifically, by way of justification he said, “I thought you had too much pride.”

Thus it was that Boyd was not a preacher who came to the end of his days wishing he had spent more time out in the fields saving lost souls. No. He came to the last years of his life wishing he had spent more time with his children, with his family, more time being a father and husband. He came to realize he did not know who his children even were…. But he was still caught in torment between his God and his humanity.

“It would have been easier for him,” as one brother says, “if we were fallen drunken whoring Christians than the unbelieving men of beauty and integrity we all became.”

And then, to this now retired preacher’s secret sorrows and shame for not being the father he believed he should have been, to his fears of personal damnation for his humanity, to the fears and griefs in his heart came a grace. He had a stroke. In his early 80′s. And he was never again the same. And not just from the long physical recover and ‘loss of memory.’

Through the grace of the stroke Boyd became a man who ‘lost his God.’ Boyd lost his theology. His religion. His beliefs. His need to posses the Truth. A certain kind of resiliency in Boyd was broken and…he found his heart.

Now, instead of trying to convert me yet again to his God and to save my fallen soul… instead of quoting to me the same Bible verses I learned to quote as a child, he now asks me how my trip over was. And he now actually says, “Thanks for coming to visit.”

“Who is this man?” my brothers now ask among ourselves. He somehow somewhere found a sense of gratitude and of humor that none of us boys recognize. “Where was this man when we were growing up?”

It was as if the covers to Boyd’s Bible had fallen open in such a way as to break the books very spine, and he managed somehow to walk out of the story of his One and Only True God. And he found himself instead to be a man with ordinary human relationships and needs, like the need to connect. To belong. To be loved. “You’re not the son I want,” he previously said to me in condemnation. I left wondering why I ever bothered to visit, and now the man expresses gratitude for my taking the time and trouble to drive a few hours to see him?

Yes, Boyd’s story became one of redemption in the end. He passed on peacefully, surrounded by his four boys who all stood amazed at the power of a man’s life to be so transformed, to have become a real father to them, in the end. To have his heart opened to vulnerability, to have ‘become a man’ of frailties and of strength, to have discovered humor and compassion for others, to be able to say at last, “I love you.” These were all transformations of a spirit.

We will never know what was the result of the particularities of brain damage or perhaps yet a new vision of a burning bush and a new and transformed God. Yet…

Yet this man in the end will teach me into my dying days about what it is to live, about how to live a life that is willing to transform, that is willing to live in “harmony with everyone and everything,” that is willing to live without the need for an identity defining enemy. And he will teach me too about how to die.

Thank you Boyd. Thank you Dad, for this continuing gift of your last years. And for your last breath.

“Siddhartha was a truth seeker, nothing more. He wasn’t looking for religion, as such — he wasn’t particularly interested in religion. He was searching for the truth. He was looking for a genuine path to freedom from suffering. Aren’t all of us searching for the same thing? If we look at the life of Siddhartha, we can see that he found the truth and freedom he was seeking only after he abandoned religious practices. Isn’t that significant? The one who became the Buddha, the “Awakened One,” didn’t find enlightenment through religion — he found it when he began to leave religion behind.” — Huffington Post: Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Is Buddhism a Religion?

NOTE: Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk on her personal ‘Stroke of Insight’ can be found here, and is highly recommended: Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight

This piece was first drafted on August 2 and subsequently revised to work as a blog post. I do want to thank the wealth of friends and family who are my community… for your well wishes during the time of my father’s passing.

For any readers who might be interested, Life’s Two Fiery Questions is a blog post here further reflecting the Joseph Campbell quote above. Also, here is a personally intimate post titled Understanding the Power of Worldviews.

Posted in 1 The River of Life — The Art of Living, 3 The Power of Arrival, Memes, People, Personal Resiliency, Personal Stories, Quotes, Religion, Resiliency, Spirituality, Story | Tagged , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

I am afraid of Beauty!

Posted on July 31, 2010 by Larry Glover

I am afraid of Beauty.

Saw this in myself tonight.

The long legs tight in black

with the slim tall torso in loose cotton white

where my eyes did not stop but found instead

the sides of her face cradled by easy flowing black hair

falling like a spring rain and framing not one

but two beautiful eyes of coal filled with a light

that happened to open into my own

seeing deep into a human soul.

Time stopped for a moment of recognition

and then I ran—quick as I could look away and

she moved on past me down the row of empty folding chairs

five away from me and sat in a place of her own.

Then we each caught the other looking yet again

to see more of who we had seen—

as if daylight might reveal

something more ordinary

and again I turned my eyes,

in flight finding the solace

of one not wanting to intrude,

be impolite, perhaps be caught

again in my lust for the beautiful feminine

having previously burned myself and her too

maybe a few hundred times.

So here, tonight, yes

sitting naked in front of the

realization that I am afraid of beauty

and drawn, inexplicably, to look yet again

by the grace of a hunger

into the mirror.

What was so fascinating to me, as I caught myself experiencing what I recognized within as a ‘fear of beauty,’ was the myriad of ways in which I saw this playing out through my life. The fear of connecting with people (not just beautiful women), a fear of joy… a fear of living fully… and a fear of death too. For surely in death there is beauty as well.

Without it, after all, there would not be the beauty to be found in birth. And I write this as my own father lies on is death bed, so the intimacy of fear and beauty are close. We all have but one father to offer to the mystery even as we have but one life of our own to offer as well.

Surly in this offering is our own re-wilding, and our own redemption.

“In ourselves the universe is revealed to itself as we are revealed in the universe.” — Thomas Berry, The Great Work, pg. 32

Note, I suspect a case can be made that it was/is a fear of the wild fierce beauty of the natural world that drives man to destroy it. So it is that this masculine fear of the feminine plays itself out in large and ‘small’ ways.

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