I want to start with this title, Giving Nature Back to Itself. The reason we chose that title was looking around, feeling in, and recognizing the way that we are so enculturated, so habituated into an extractive relationship with nature. It’s really important that we don’t take it personally or take it on as something to be ashamed of. It’s built into our Western worldview, it’s been hardwired into us and we see it in the blatant ways of taking minerals, of viewing the natural world as resources. We all are very aware of that level of extraction, but there are many more layers to it than that.
I live in Moab, Utah, which is near Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park. It’s a destination for literally millions of people every year because it is spectacularly beautiful. Just a couple nights ago I went down the road here with a good friend. We were going for a walk and as we were driving down the road to where we were going to start walking, we saw several parking lots, very full of vehicles. Looking up on the rocks, there were a couple different places where you could see people high up, getting ready to base jump off those rocks. And we saw other people leaving the road with helmets and ropes. They were going to where you can climb up near an arch, to repel off the arch, back down, then do this little circuit. And then there were some ATVs that went by and there were some mountain bikes that went by and it was a little, even to somebody used to seeing all of these activities, being a Friday evening on a beautiful weekend, it was still a little startling. I could really feel this almost Disneyland kind of quality, of this whole place as kind of a backdrop to these adventure activities.
Often the Buddhist instruction of the external is taken as interrelation with only other human beings…
This is a more blatant version, but you see it in our beautiful parks, people going from arch to arch and seeing the arch is the event and what’s in between is kind of not important. We all have seen this, in the proliferation of the important thing isn’t even the arch. It’s taking the picture of me in front of the arch and on and on. This spectacular place has become a backdrop for the experience of me doing something.
And so here we have these very extreme versions, but I want to then backtrack. I’m not happy about them, but they’re a good example. I’m going to get to the more subtle aspect of it, but first I want to share with you a reminder about the Buddha’s instructions. He encouraged us to do our practice and reflect on our practice in all the different ways of being mindful, to do that internally and to do that externally. Being Westerners who are more preoccupied with the individual we have generally taken our meditation practice and our spiritual practice as an internal one. We keep looking in, looking in about me – I, me and mine – and about what’s happening here. And this is very important. I’m not trying to lessen the importance of that, but the Buddha also pointed to our practice as external and understanding the external world and our relationship.
So what are the possibilities of our practice being an externally oriented one as well and recognizing that we’re not the only ones here, when we turn outside. Often the Buddhist instruction of the external is taken as interrelation with only other human beings, like about our speech to other people. But what if we understood the external to really include this much larger world, the more than human world, the Earth itself? How does our practice lead us to a different relationship with the external? And then of course that reflects back into the internal, it’s a dance.
So to go back to this relationship when we go outside. I was communicating this extreme and I could see people nodding their heads and sort of seeing that, wow, it’s easy to recognize it. But can we recognize it also on subtler levels when we go outside into the natural world and we’re still trying to get something, maybe get a little peace of mind, maybe get some silence, get some way that I will calm down, that I can forget about my worries, or maybe I can just go out and see a beautiful sunset and be awed by the sunset or I’ll have a great experience or I’ll see something I’ve never seen before.
Can you feel, as I sort of name one after another, the way that there’s a kind of reaching out, a greed, a lusting after something, an idea that if I get the right thing out there, then I will somehow be more fulfilled, more happy, more full, and this leaning out, this clinging that then becomes a becoming. The Buddha says, first we cling and then we become this identity, this me, self, going out and doing my thing and to recognize this and wonder is there another alternative? I think we can, all of us, you would be an unusual person if you didn’t have this. I recognize it in myself as I go outside. I teach retreats in beautiful places. When we do those retreats in beautiful places, are we still seeing the natural world as a beautiful backdrop for us to have our experience. This is what we have to really lean into and sense this lusting forward and reaching.
Dogen, patriarch of the Zen tradition, has a wonderful phrase. He says, when the self goes out and fills the world, that is delusion. Think about that. When the self goes out and fills the world, that is delusion. When the world comes in and fills the self that is awakening.
So this very simple thing, he’s pointing to a different possibility. What if instead of lusting after the world, what if we could settle back and let the world come to us. When we go out into the nature, let the bird, the sound, the visual, what would it be to let it come to us, to dissolve the me that needs something in particular, to simplify, to potentially enter with an attitude of receptivity, of contentment, of not needing a particular thing. This is a very profound invitation that the Buddha was pointing to in our practice. We hear it all the time in relation to power and money and needing a certain job or relationship and consumerism, we hear those teachings a lot. But what if this also expands to our relationship with the more than human world?
This was excerpted from a talk Susie Harrington offered to participants in our November 2023 EcoDharma Exploration. Visit the program page for the full recorded gathering – Giving Nature Back to Itself: A Path of Deep Reciprocity.
