Jargogled Impressions.

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” ― John Muir

As a kid, I never so much as gave attention to the natural bounty that I was surrounded with. In Jharkhand, as the name literally suggests, the land is full of untamed wilderness with a spigot of greenery that has stayed unlocked despite the various streams of commercial development encroaching on its way. And yet, while I was living there during the first 15 years of my life, the natural splendor did not register as much on my consciousness.

From my hometown in Giridih, there was a route that we used to take always to visit Madhuban – a religious destination where 22 of our 24 tirthankaras gained enlightenment. As you can imagine, the place held its pride of position amongst the religious destinations within us Jains. As you can also guess, my family ended up doing the rounds every now and then to the place that was about 55-60min car ride from home.

The space between the town I lived in (Giridih) and the hamlet that was Madhuban, was a panoply of wilderness with intermittent hills and curvy roads that brought to the car windows a scene reminiscent of the cross-country train rides that I started taking a few years down the line after I left home for higher studies. To this date, I can still somehow visually recall the weird assortment of trees that lined the sides of the road.

Reading Florence Williams in The Nature Fix, took me back to the early 90s when my consciousness was still open to new experiences and when our memories and stimulations were an unkempt pandora’s box. The idea that nature is therapeutic to our constantly stressed mind and that through its smell, its visual symmetry via the fractal patterns abundant in the forests and in the trees, we can find solace and comfort, away from the dins of modern life is why I find living in Seattle a calming experience.

“biophilia”; that honor goes to social psychologist Erich Fromm, who described it in 1973 as “the passionate love of life and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea or a social group.” – The Nature Fix

A quick walk down the lane where I live, the kaleidoscopic assortment of plants, trees, and wildflowers takes me by surprise often. With abundant rains and a perfect warm, temperate climate driven by the dry winds sloping in from the cascade mountains and Fraser valley, Seattle offers a veritable treasure trove of nature’s bounty with its oaks, conifers, birches, cedars, hemlocks, and pines. And brings me much closer to home through biophilia than the actual distance might suggest.

A passionate love of life and all that is alive, including the wilderness we are often blessed to be surrounded with. Thoreau asked the question “…what would become of us if we only walked in malls and gardens”, suggesting that the fields and the woods serve a different purpose in our lives that the man-made gardens cannot solve.

“I find the intellectual compulsion to break apart the pieces of nature and examine them one by one both interesting and troubling. I understand it’s the way science typically works: to understand a system, you (must) understand the parts, find the mechanism, put your flag on a piece of new ground. The poets would find this is nonsense. It’s not just the smell of a cypress, or the sound of the birds, or the color green that unlocks the pathway to health in our brains. We’re full sensory beings, or at least we were once built to be. Isn’t it possible that it’s only when you open all the doors – literally and figuratively – that the real magic happens?”

Camus said, “Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is”. For the sake of development and progress, we often steer ourselves away from the unity we often naturally find with the natural wonders around us. When we separate ourselves as distinct from nature, we are left with a gaping void that we try filling in with more of the same – anthropomorphize our sense of belonging through man-made stuff. As the world increasingly becomes urban and in our relentless push to be “a machine for making money”, we are left with an unfilled desire to be closer to things that give us a sense of awe and a reckoning of things that are beyond us. Nature, in its generous wake, offers up a simple way to de-clutter our minds and expose it to the secret life of trees, of forests. The community we create around us helps us thrive on this world. Pity that we have forgotten that nature is and should be part of our community.

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ~Albert Einstein

We often find ourselves marveling at our insignificance when confronted with the expanse of nature. The tall mountains, motions of heavenly bodies above our heads, the microcosm of a tree in its sublime being, are all guideposts for us to reconsider our fascination with the urban way of being.