Connection & Confidence with Nature's Reflections
The Healing HeArt of Nature’s Love Stories
The songs and stories of This Wonderful World are made to grow peace through self-love and love for the world around me (check out how here). But how do the reflections of the natural world support that love, and why does love matter so much?
Loving (our) Nature for Overcoming Loneliness
When I look within myself and into the world today, I see a lot of loneliness and insecurity. In 2023, a study showed that roughly 1 in 3 people in the world feel lonely (33%)1 while 52% of Americans feel lonely as well2. Furthermore, the study found that “The number of people who report having no friends has quadrupled in the last 30 years.3” In 2023, the Surgeon General even declared loneliness to be an epidemic4.
But it’s not just loneliness that is getting in the way of our peace. Psychology Today reported that, “it’s estimated that roughly 85% of people worldwide (adults and adolescents) have low self-esteem.5" This is important to recognize as loneliness has been linked to low-self-esteem, and vice versa6.
Personally, I know them both well as I have lived through the horrific cycle of worthlessness and loneliness. When I feel insecure, I tend to be more defensive, which negatively impacts my relationships, which the contributes to loneliness. Similarly, when I have low-self esteem, I isolate myself in embarrassment, which also contributes to my loneliness. Then, my loneliness confirms my low-esteem in a vicious cycle that paralyzes me.
On my path of recovery, it’s been love (and more specifically the love that I have grown in service to and reflection with the natural world) that has broken the cycle to build self-worth and connection to the world around me. Firstly, by serving the Earth alongside my community, I build caring connections in a positively-oriented social group. Secondly, through creative reflection with the natural world, I’ve gained wisdom that’s helped me forgive myself and others, build confidence in my resilience, and find gratitude within life’s cycles -all of which have amounted to growing self-esteem (learn more about my service-centered art here)
But, is (our) Nature Really Loving?
That being said, looking for reflections of love within the natural world might seem counterproductive when glancing up and down the food-chain or across the competition that exists within species. Flowing rivers, birds chirping, gentle wind in the trees, and the quiet blooming of wildflowers all seems relevant to peace, but what about the storms, animals vying for survival or gardeners ripping out weeds? Is that really a peaceful model?
No doubt, serving and reflecting with Earth can be uncomfortable when I’m looking at disconnected pieces. But, the pieces of Earth are not disconnected; they are all part of each other; they all serve an essential role. The more I’ve learned about nature’s interconnecting parts and cycles, the more I’ve been able to appreciate all the reflections it offers. As I make peace with those parts of nature, I make peace with those parts of me and in others: the hawk and the mouse, the snow and sun -all the parts of the one (learn more about biodiversity here)
With that in mind, my practice of creative reflection is one perspective that reminds me, in every moment, that I am both part of life and I am related to it. Still, big questions arise when I ask:
Is Love Really a Part of Life?
An amazing series called Life On Our Planet offered an answer to this question: With the support of “65 paleontologists and other Earth scientists,7” the answer provided is no willy-nilly philosophy. In the spirit of a truly great nature documentary, this series took tremendous care in making sure that it was scientifically accurate.
With that in mind, it said the basics of life are: evolution, competition, and mass extinction. The overall tone of the presentation had the gripping, edge-of-your-seat impact of a horror movie with big, scary teeth, lots of violence, and ongoing ominous music. “This is life,” it said.
It’s a familiar story that’s been told to me in science books and media since I was kid. So, I understand and appreciate how it came to be so beautifully made into a major documentary.
Still, there’s one thing that I would add to this list of life’s foundations:
Love.
“Love?” You might ask. “How could love be a fundamental part of life? Maybe it is for humans (though some would definitely argue that), but for LIFE?”
Within the animal kingdom perhaps we could take the leap to see that animals sometimes love each other, though I’m certain that some would call that anthropomorphic, especially if we get into reptile or insect species which tend to be harder to imagine as loving beings than cuddly polar bear cubs or devoted emperor penguin parents. Apparently, many reptiles and fish don’t even recognize their own offspring and will sometimes eat them or mate with them3 (Sorry Nemo. Tough luck). But it’s not just the cold-blooded that have a hard time recognizing their offspring. According to an article I read, recognizing offspring is harder than you might think, even for birds and mammals, like us. So, let’s just say, even within the animal kingdom, love can feel like a stretch that might just be explained as evolutionarily adaptive behaviors for survival.
But for plants? Now that might be ridiculous. They don’t even have hearts! They don’t have brains! Sure, they have a central nervous system, but it’s not the same. They don’t have feelings like us8. How could they possibly love? And, let’s not even get into rocks. Please ... .don't start talking to me about unrequited roc-mance.
All this to say: I can understand why love has often been left out of the basic equation of life. It doesn’t make sense.
But then again, has Love ever made sense? Not to me. I’ve done some seriously strange things for love that didn’t have any obvious benefit for me at all, and even felt quite risky. It felt right, though. In fact, it’s been the ability to identify what love would ask of me, and then the willingness to do it (even when it doesn’t make any sense), that has brought peace to my life. Still, I absolutely don't understand it, which is why it’s been so hard. Nevertheless, it’s been a game changer.
But what does that have to do with life, or plants, or mountains or worms? Why does love matter when we look at life?
For environmentalists there might be an obvious answer: it matters for us to love life because loving the environment means that we take care of it, and we need it to live. Again, from this perspective, love is a matter of survival.
But does life love itself? Does life love us?
I’ve heard many spiritual traditions say “Yes. Life does love us.” And though I can’t speak for any of them (because I was raised to believe in science), what I can say is that it has impacted me to hear stories that life might care about me as much as I care about it. It’s been healing, to say the least, to consider that, maybe, life is more than a heartless place of surviving through horrifically challenging conditions.
Maybe it’s make-believe, but, in the end, what isn’t? In college I took a class called Science and Storytelling which offered the perspective that science, too, is an ongoing attempt to tell the story of life with growing accuracy. Since then, I’ve come to recognize that even as we gather as many concrete details as possible (as methodically and objectively as we can, which, again, can be quite tricky), ultimately, to tell a meaningful story of our findings we still need to fill in the blanks of many mysteries. And the only way to do that is with our imagination.
We can, for example, gather much evidence about the dinosaurs, but there’s still lots of blank space in what we know. Indeed, that was a really long time ago (like a really, really long time ago) and none of us were there. A lot of what we understand about the dinosaurs is a story that we’re telling based on as much evidence as possible. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, even as it means that the story changes as new discoveries are made. I appreciate the earnest and dedicated inquiry that keeps our understanding of life growing. Indeed, we’re all still figuring out this-thing-called-life. And, apparently, it’s an endless discovery.
I do, however, think it matters to recognize how the substance that we use to fill-in the gaps of life’s mystery ends up shaping our perspective in ways that contribute to the creation of our reality. Indeed, whether or not I mean to fill-in the gaps of life’s unknowns, the study of bias shows that I do. Then, in the study of the impact of bias, it becomes clear how important it is to grow our awareness of it.
That being said, my practice of creative reflection is one of perspective that recognizes how the way I see the world impacts my reality through a very simple pattern: the way I see the world impacts how I treat it, the way I treat it impacts how it treats me, and the way it treats me impacts how I see it. Of course there are many complexities to this seemingly simple formula, but that’s why I practice.
With that in mind, there is room to wonder about the power of purposeful perspective. What am I using to fame and fill-in-the-gaps of life’s unknown, and perhaps more importantly, why?
Now, we get to love.
Seeing (our) Nature with Love
As an artist, I take my creative liberties seriously. I choose to fill-in the gaps of life’s mysteries with love because I have witnessed, over and over again, the life-affirming power of a loving perspective. As an artist I get to choose, with endlessly increasing awareness and intention, how I create my life with the story that I tell of it. In this way, I become not only an artist of my life, but a creator of it.
With that in mind, in my creative reflections I play with the purposeful projection of love. Indeed, there’s no way to know if the scrub oak loves the mountain lion, or if the sagebrush loves the grouse. I don’t know that sunflowers love birds or butterflies. But I do know that it’s an absolute wonder to witness how perfectly everything in nature ends up working together. I know that it’s mind-blowingly amazing that plants can turn the energy from the sun into food for themselves that ends up being food for us, and that when animals (like us) eat those plants (however predatorily we may be portrayed), the leftover parts (our poop) ends us being food for the plants use to flourish into even more abundance for us to eat. In a lot of ways, nature has become the greatest teacher of love for me.
What a true wonder.
Still, love may not always be obvious in direct exchanges between or amongst species, but from the view of the sun, it’s much easier to see. And when I tell the story of life from a perspective way up high, hope returns to me (which has felt pretty necessary for life lately).
No doubt I have an unabashed bias to love now, which grows greater the more I realize myself as a true force of nature. I look for love in every moment. And as I tell the story of what I see through the lens of love (that I’m absolutely imagining), love shows up increasingly concrete, each time easier to see and believe. As a result, my relationships to myself and my relationships with others have been healing. Slowly but surely I’ve been growing confidence and connection with nature’s love songs and stories guiding me.
https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/loneliness-statistics#:~:text=Statistics show that one in,children also report feeling lonely.
Ibid.
Ibid.
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sustainable-life-satisfaction/201906/the-relationship-yourself#:~:text=In fact, it's estimated that,) have low self-esteem.
https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=psych_honproj#:~:text=If you have ever experienced,respect (Rosenberg, 1965).
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/life-on-our-planet-release-date-news-trailer
https://www.treehugger.com/do-plants-have-feelings-science-explainer-5546944#:~:text=Plants%20lack%20a%20central%20nervous,with%20other%20plants%20about%20them.