“Conversation is perhaps our greatest hope not only for healing the rifts in human understanding but also for restoring and reinspiring our relationship with the natural world, which is our first and most profound home. Care of the world is always essential, and care arises from conversation.”
—Thomas Dean, Introduction, Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit, by Cindy Crosby and Thomas Dean (Ice Cube Press, 2019)
A sympathetic touch on the arm, a pat on the back, holding hands—these all can carry significant meaning as part of a conversation. Engaged conversationalists pay attention to cues from all their senses, not just the sounds of talking. As we enter into deeper conversation with nature during these days of social distancing, we must employ all our senses, including the intimacy of touch.
In his book The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul (Oxford University Press, 2019), Belden Lane speaks passionately about his twenty-year relationship with a hundred-year-old cottonwood tree, which he calls “Grandfather,” in the park across the street from his St. Louis home. Following Martin Buber’s enjoinder in I and Thou to relate to a tree not as an object, an “it,” but to develop a true relationship with it through “a mystery of reciprocity,” Lane says, “Grandfather and I do the same, communicating in a nonverbal, sensuous way. When I pass my hand over the deep furrows of his bark … (I) imagine being touched by Grandfather in return. The play of imagination and reverie, operating through the senses, is how we connect.” In that reverie, Lane says he “may sense a subtle shift in consciousness—a thought or feeling that arises within me (and yet seems to be more than me)” (pp. 19–20).
Prairiewoods regularly offers (in non-coronavirus days) wonderful introductions to opening your senses to nature, including touch, such as Emelia Sautter’s Guided Ecospirituality Experience sessions and Shinrin-Yoku sessions with Dr. Suzanne Bartlett Hackenmiller. Shinrin-yoku is the Japanese practice of “forest bathing,” which is often used as nature therapy but is an excellent way to become more attentive to the natural world for any reason (and you don’t need to limit the practice to the forest either).
I participated in one of Dr. Bartlett Hackenmiller’s shinrin-yoku sessions at Prairiewoods a couple of years ago on a brisk March day. As we explored touch, I placed my hands on the ground, my left on some dead, dry, yellowed grass, and my right on a cluster of emerging fresh green shoots. In this time of transition between the sleep of winter and the awakening of spring, my left palm felt the brittle, warm remnants of last year’s grass, and my right felt the cool, moist burgeoning of new growth. We associate death with cold and life with vital warmth, yet my palms told me an opposite story, a story that reminded me not to make assumptions about the world, and that “life” and “death” are intertwined and don’t always conform to our expectations.
Soon it was tree-touching time. I chose an ash and placed my hands on either side of its mature trunk. I stood where trunk met ground, where the tree’s solidity was fullest. My hands sensed this sturdy, nearly immovable strength, yet I also felt the textured lines of raised bark, delicate pieces that could easily break off with the slightest pressure of my fingers. Through my touch, the ash told me that, like all creatures of this earth, it was both formidable and vulnerable.
As we seek to understand the complications of a world in the midst of pandemic, the natural world is, first and always, the ground (literally and figuratively) from which we experience our body and spirit. The rhythms and cycles of that world continue on even as we change our human habits in response to this new viral threat. If we converse attentively with the natural world, we learn from the many lessons it holds, even as they upend our assumptions and expectations. Especially now when human touch is widely restricted, the reverie of touch with the teachers and mentors of nature, the shift in consciousness from feeling the mystery of reciprocity with our fingers and hands, connects us powerfully with all that is more than what we are.
—Thomas Dean, Prairiewoods programming facilitator and co-author (with Cindy Crosby) of Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit (Ice Cube Press, 2019)