What’s Nature Got to Do with It?
Dedicated to Wilderness School co-instructor Michael Bowe and to all the students, for they have enriched our lives.
Written by: Margo Nottoli
Hiking through an Appalachian forest in northwestern Connecticut, with my co-instructor and ten pre-adjudicated youth, we are making our presence known. It is day three of a 26-day wilderness experience designed to help these young people set their lives upon a new, more positive course. As the last light filters through the trees, their raucous trail banter gradually gives way to the rhythmic pants of a steep ascent. In this still moment, I am aware of the vulnerability and resilience of these ancient mountains mirrored in the ways of our small tribe. We have returned to this primeval forest to repair and renew.
The trail is steep, and the rhododendrons are dense. As darkness wraps us, a screech owl startles a young man from New Haven who has never been out of the city. He feels much safer there and misses his music and friends. He will eventually come to know where the moon rises and sets each night. He will draw strength from this knowledge and write poetry that speaks of abuse and forgiveness at the precise moment of moonrise and sunset atop an ancient mountain.
Student comments written in the group journal this night reveal the wilderness working its magic. "The walk was incredible but so was the view from Lion's Head.” “This day was perfect for the view. I don't mind hiking but going up those steep hills really killed me.” “It was really funny the way every person that reached the top started swearing about the hike but then when they saw the view they just looked and weren't complaining anymore. They were silent." Another writes, "This land that dwells here looks so majestic. I feel as though I should bow down before it with honor."
Gazing at Cassiopeia, with everyone tucked in their tarps, I am struck by the effect this wilderness immersion has upon even the hardest heart in our group. As stone yields to water, so one young woman begins to reshape her life. She will come to revere the time she spends hiking through this mountain range―working through the terrors evoked by the darkness of the woods and the absence of everything familiar and safe―to find a vulnerability buried even deeper than her fears, and to allow it to premiere with our group. She will return to the woods to keep this new flame kindled. She tells us, "I am like the wilderness. In it I see parts of myself that I like and dislike. In it I see my beauty, pain, and turmoil."
Research about wilderness challenge experiences validates the claim “transformative.” Such gains as increased self-esteem, improved peer relationships, enhanced performance in school, and reduced recidivism are attributed to an experiential learning process that includes immersion in a graduated series of challenges where one deals with the immediate consequences, including those that nature provides. Guided by educators who facilitate goals, foster a positive crew culture, and consciously use metaphor to reinforce new insights, students often discover new and better selves. There is little mention, though, of the role of the very medium―nature―as catalyst for these changes. And how it impacts this student to say, "I am here with all these new people. There's a message of peace. I think it is in the trees. I hope to gather strength from them and from the mountains and fresh air."
Throughout the ages, philosophers, theologians, writers, and psychologists have written about nature’s power to transform. In 1843, John Ruskin spoke of how the experience of nature penetrates one’s spirit: "I am sure we have all sometime or other experienced a great sense of tranquility and beauty coming to us from the green fields, the setting sun, the still waters, or the snow-capped peaks ... What goes to make up this inward sense of beauty? Surely, to have this sense of inward beauty, there must be complete abandonment; the sense of not being held, of no restraint, no defense, no resistance.”
Henry David Thoreau was emphatic on nature’s effect. “I would fain improve every opportunity to wonder and worship, as a sunflower welcomes the light. The more thrilling, wonderful, divine objects I behold in a day, the more expanded and immortal I become.” The author Barbara Kingsolver speaks of this alchemy―"...it was the experience of nature, with its powerful lessons in static change and predictable surprise. Much of what I know about life, and almost everything I believe about the way I want to live, was formed in those woods." Our students sense this, too: "I thought I was going to die getting up here [to the mountaintop], but I didn't. Being up here makes me glad to be alive."
Many people describe sublime experiences in nature as transcendent. Abraham Maslow called them peak experiences and wrote of their ability to transform: “Knowledge obtained in peak- insight-experiences can be validated and valuable. In peak experiences several kinds of attention- change can lead to new knowledge. This new knowledge can be attention widening so that the whole cosmos is perceived as a unity, and one’s place in this whole is simultaneously perceived. This new knowledge can be a change in attitude, valuing reality in a different way, seeing things from a new perspective.”
New insights are often embedded with metaphor and symbols from the initial experience. A year after her wilderness course, one student reflects, "I left the course feeling reborn and that now life would be much easier. I did not realize that the road was going to get longer and rockier. During the year I was in a low dark valley struggling to get out. I finally climbed out and when I reached the mountaintop, I knew it because everything seemed more beautiful and promising, just as it had on our hike. I remembered how to hike out. The blue skies gleamed with new hope, and I saw that once again the view was beautiful and the effort to climb out was well worth it." Another student states, "Now [since the course] the sun is like a huge fifty cent piece that someone has poured kerosene on and then lit with a match and said, 'Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper.' So now, I always carry that coin in my pocket and take it out in times of depression."
What's nature got to do with it? Ten young people hike across an ancient mountain range to reclaim their lives. A carefully honed change process unfolds. Where? Not in the classroom, not in the city, but under the stars, deep in the woods. Nature is the medium of choice for this transformation. In a process akin to Ruskin’s description of nature as catalyst, these young people drop their defenses, examine their lives, and dare to have dreams under a canopy of stars, trees, sunsets, and the violence of summer storms. Their experience of nature helps to dissolve resistance at a deeper level. They come, in the best possible way, unhinged from the presence of their past and are freed to imagine the future. Parallel processes. Nature helps to open a window to their deepest, most authentic self.
The theologian Thomas Berry said, “Only if the human imagination is activated by the flight of the great soaring birds in the heavens, by the blossoming flowers of the earth, by the sight of the sea, by the lightening and thunder of the great storms that break through the heat of summer, only then will the deep experiences be evoked within the inner human soul.” Ten young people learn to drink at this well. They will come to miss their intimate connection to the phases of the moon and return to the forest to invigorate their dreams.
Adapted from an article written for Warren Wilson College’s Heartstone Journal, 2002.