If we lived lifestyles that are actively in accordance with Nature and not distant from it in a home with what we now see as necessary: heating, cooling, electricity, etc., would we be less surprised when disaster strikes in Nature? Would we understand more that, at times, living is a struggle and we have to move through it versus blaming it on a figure who has become a cultural icon for things they actively have no part in?
I used to work and live for long stretches of time in the wilderness. One of the first things you realize is that every single day is different from the one before it. Our standardized industrial days are completely alien to the natural world and its rhythms. Necessity requires that I live in a more or less ordinary suburban house these days, but I find that the simple practice of getting outside under the trees every day is a key to my mental health.
"Mental health"-- there's an interesting term. "Mind" is another name for "psyche," which means "soul." "Health" is defined as a condition of wholeness, from which the word is derived. So I might have said "Getting outside under the trees every day is the key to wholeness of soul" and been just as accurate!
I'm going to need to think about your comments on America and the American mind. I'm also American. One thing that occurs to me-- I'm American also, by the way-- I've been all over this country, and it really is not one country. The northwest, the northeast, the midwest, the true west; NorCal, SoCal, Texas... they're all totally different worlds, inhabited by totally different people. I honestly see "America" as more of a religion than a nation. There is essentially nothing-- not religion, race, ethnicity, history, geography-- that unites all 330 million of us, and so we have to produce a shared identity and impose it by any means necessary to keep the country from flying apart. Other than that... I don't know. The state of the nation and what we might call "the problem of America" troubles me a great deal.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2020-12-18 12:48 pm (UTC)I think this is an excellent point:
I used to work and live for long stretches of time in the wilderness. One of the first things you realize is that every single day is different from the one before it. Our standardized industrial days are completely alien to the natural world and its rhythms. Necessity requires that I live in a more or less ordinary suburban house these days, but I find that the simple practice of getting outside under the trees every day is a key to my mental health.
"Mental health"-- there's an interesting term. "Mind" is another name for "psyche," which means "soul." "Health" is defined as a condition of wholeness, from which the word is derived. So I might have said "Getting outside under the trees every day is the key to wholeness of soul" and been just as accurate!
I'm going to need to think about your comments on America and the American mind. I'm also American. One thing that occurs to me-- I'm American also, by the way-- I've been all over this country, and it really is not one country. The northwest, the northeast, the midwest, the true west; NorCal, SoCal, Texas... they're all totally different worlds, inhabited by totally different people. I honestly see "America" as more of a religion than a nation. There is essentially nothing-- not religion, race, ethnicity, history, geography-- that unites all 330 million of us, and so we have to produce a shared identity and impose it by any means necessary to keep the country from flying apart. Other than that... I don't know. The state of the nation and what we might call "the problem of America" troubles me a great deal.