Nature Deficit Disorder? Or: Open the door and Walk on Outside
Baby Apples at the Garden Park
NATURE DEFICIT DISORDER
All we need is another disorder, right? Especially if we sling it into the alphabet mix, and now have NDD to add to ADD and AHDD and MS and OCD and so on.
So, let's skip NDD and even skip nature deficit disorder except as a lead in to a central lack of our time: a disconnection of our everyday life with nature. As I write this on the computer, I can look out the window and see the grevillea in bloom, bright red against a blue sky, and that's still not the same as being outside and smelling the flower and breathing the fresh air.
Grivillea in April
Same with you, unless you are lucky enough to have some way to read this on a laptop outside. You are indoors, I am indoors, and still if I get out and walk and touch the earth with my feet each day I am much more complete as a person, if I breathe fresh air, and raise my head and eyes to clouds and birds and the vast blue of the sky, this expands my vision of what it means to be human.
Feet on earth, eyes and mind to the heavens: we are meant to be full.
A life indoors alone, a life deprived off real light, a life deprived of real air, that doesn't seem like a real life at all to me.
How about you?
I got the title of this essay from an interview with Richard Louv on his thoughts and ideas from his book: Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, in the February 2007 Sun Magazine.
If you don't know Sun Magazine yet, go to SunMagazine.org and begin to feast on a wonderful world.
And do subscribe. They have no ads, and lots of poems and photographs in glorious black and white. And an amazing section, found nowhere else, called Reader's Write, on all sorts of openended topics, like Late at Night, Second Chances, Mothers, Weddings, Quitting. This month it's Praying.
And when you get your issue, go find a stream to read it near. Or a meadow. Garden. Back Yard. You got the sunny picture.
Loving Nature is another way of loving ourselves, since we are nature.
Ciao,
Chris
PLEASE BE WELL:
Pleasure
Ease
Awareness
Sensitive Strength
Enjoyment
BE
Waking up to now.
Embracing Change.
Learning to learn.
Loving to move, improve and transform.
Labels: Loving our lives, Loving the Earth, nature
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