Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [62]
CHAPTER FIVE
The Body of the World
Eyes Wide Open
CHAMELI GAD ARDAGH
If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.
–Buddha
In some indigenous cultures a core practice is to visit the same place in nature every day and to keep discovering and exploring the changing and shifting details of the place. This kind of practice radically opens our sensory receptivity so that we can feel all the movements around us as our own movements, and our own actions will therefore arise from an expanded sense of self. It is as if our eyes truly open for the first time and from this clear perspective the universe almost becomes technicolored; everything seems fluid and pulsating with life. Many of us remember this kind of receptivity from our childhood, when every little stone and stick were portals into exciting adventures, and we had not yet been caught in what Albert Einstein calls “the optical illusion of the human mind”; the feeling of separation from the earth and all her beings.
When we take time to connect with our earth from a more silent place within, to look and to listen with soft receptivity, we discover a world full of vibrant life. It seems as if the world has revealed itself from its hiding place behind a two-dimensional gray blanket, but the change has of course occurred within us. Connected to ourselves on a level deeper than just the busy activity of our thoughts, we can see clearly again. Normally we live mostly inside the little world of our own thoughts, and when we look at nature as we would look at a picture, at first it doesn’t seem like much is going on. But as we open our senses, more and more of the wonder and the interconnectedness of it all is revealed to us.
It is humbling to become aware of the two-way exchange that takes place when we start to open to nature as a teacher. We sometimes set out on a mission thinking that we are saving the environment, and in the process we may discover that on this planet human beings are babies compared to most of the other species around us. Of course, we do what we can to respect and care for nature, but perhaps a big shift will come when we realize that maybe it is nature that will save us.
This radical shift of perspective also happened for the women in Kenya who took part in the Green Belt Movement, when they discovered that when they cared for the trees, the trees cared for them back in surprising ways.
In December 2004 a woman wearing brightly colored clothes emphasizing the deep tone of her skin was standing at the podium of the Nobel Institute in Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The fact that she was the first African woman to receive the prize was a sign of a radical change in women’s position in the world. That she received the prize for planting trees expanded our understanding of peace and honored our interdependency with Mother Earth. Yes, Wangari Maathai received the Nobel Peace Price for planting trees.
Thirty years ago, in Wangari Maathai’s home country of Kenya, 90 percent of the forest had been chopped down, transforming the land into a desert. The job of collecting firewood for meal preparation belonged to the women and girls, and they had to spend hours away from home looking for the few branches that were to be found. Wangari watched all this and decided that there must be a way to take better care of the land and of the women and girls. So she planted a tree. And then she planted another. Soon she realized that it would take an awful lot of time to cover the land with trees if she were to plant them all by herself.