How Is Your Soul? Need Nature?

How's your soul?

Today is a blustery sort of day here - a real spring day. The sun is out, but it hailed (hard!) at 4:30 or so this a.m., and the clouds are scudding by - predicted to hit gusts of 60 km today. The water is white with froth as it moves over the tide-flats.

There is something about nature - and being in nature - that improves my soul's well being. I don't thing I'm the only one. I believe there is something we humans intrinsically know ... that we need to be outside in touch with nature. I think we all know we loose something when we are cut off from it.

I ran into the following 7 minute interview with Commander Bill King of the Galloway Blazer II fame. The interview takes place when King is 102, about a year before he died. He was one of the participants in the first Golden Globe race, where Galloway Blazer capsized, and he gave up the race. He returned to the sea a short time later (after a refit) and completed a solo-circumnavigation in 1973.

But listen to his reasons for going out to sea. At the time of the interview his was the only surviving World War II submarine commander alive, and the only one who was commanding submarines at both the start and end of the war (not to mention during). He talks about trying to figure a way to deal with his anxiety ... what we'd probably now call PSD.

I can't help but wonder if re-connecting returned soldiers with nature might be helpful - not only to them, but to the world.

I'll let Wendell Berry's Poem conclude today's meditation.

Blessed Be

Joel

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
~ Wendell Berry

Nature Deficit Disorder

During the middle of summer, with many of us out on the water, in the woods, and otherwise enjoying nature, we may not give much thought to being deficient in nature "vitamins." The following is a quote from a men's devotional that a reader sent in after seeing last weeks Creation-Care 365 article. Hope you are enjoying the awe of nature and taking time for those free sunsets (if not sunrises)!

Day 292
Nature Deficit Disorder
My spiritual father, St. Francis, was one of the few later Christian saints who made a consistent and clear connection with nature. Yet much of Christian history has had to do with books, translations, and universities; internecine fights among academics and seminaries; and people arguing about words, salvation theories, and worship styles.
We are suffering from a major case of Christian NDD – Nature Deficit Disorder. At this point, I sincerely believe that the earth is the only thing shared enough, wise enough, suffering enough, and God-created enough to truly change most men [and women]. Get out, stay quiet, be alone, and listen long and happily. “Nature is the primary and most perfect revelation of the divine,” said St. Thomas Aquinas. It was the Bible before the Bible, and we stopped reading it.

How do I spend time with nature? How can I make that time more conducive to spiritual wonder?*

*Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, (Chicago, Loyola Press, 2010), p 301