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Being in the strangeness of nature

April 13, 2005 By Uncategorized

I’m reading a number of excellent books at the moment that have nothing to do with facilitation except that they are about seeing the natural in the world. TC McLuhan’s “The Way of the Earth” is fantastic and so is Thoreau’s classic Walden, from which comes this quote:

“It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow-storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round — for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost — do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as be awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

As a facilitator I try to use processes that are natural, that work with self-organization, chaos and order the way nature works with them. This passage nicely describes the sense of unease and disorientation one feels in the chaos of Open Space for example that leads to a realization of “the infinite extent of our relations.”

In the words of the Japanese art critic Soetsu Yangi, quoted by McLuhan:

Nature must be freely at work in the mind when anything is well made. Through painstaking efforts may have a contribution to make in carrying out a work, more astonishing is the effect that “nomindedness” has upon it. One gains greater insight into nature by open trust rather than by attempts at intellectual understanding.

I have some big processes to plan and facilitate over the next few weeks and so I’m going outside now to sit under an arbutus tree and sketch the swordfern fiddle heads that are coming up.