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A- P A T H- T O -N AT U R E- I N -Y O U R- LI F E
We've renamed this column to better reflect Dave's project! This month, he offers us another way to shift our perspective that is perfect for the dark time of the year. Keep 'em coming Dave! - Editor.
Awakening the Senses
by Dave Santillo
Photo by Dave Santillo
"I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken."
John Updike, The Centaur
Fall is in full swing, and it’s a colorful and vibrant dance in New England. There’s a whirlwind of activity in nature to experience if you allow yourself to stop and smell the roses, or more appropriately for this season, stop and nibble the rose hips. But as always, it’s easy to rush through daily life and forget about how valuable and regenerating it is to make time to immerse yourself in Nature. There’s the usual bustle with bird migration well underway, and resident birds and mammals urgently preparing in various ways for the winter season. It’s a great time of year to practice increasing your nature awareness and start down the road to perception! I refer to perception as Aldo Leopold did in his famous Sand County Almanac as perception of the natural processes by which the land and the living things on it come to be and how they maintain that existence.
But what exactly does it mean to increase your awareness in nature, and how do you do it?
Awaken and sharpen your senses! Sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. Like many people, I overwhelmingly rely on sight first, and the others need a bit of a wake-up call from time to time. Unless I’m really concentrating on it, hearing and smell seem to kick in mostly when they are jarred by extreme obtrusions of each. Taste and touch obviously have their places in our lives, but generally evade constant awareness.
I’ve found that my senses can be sharpened in many ways, and that this can greatly increase my ability to experience nature. One way is to concentrate on each sense individually when out in nature. Another way is to hinder those senses, individually, that sometimes tend to dissuade you from using your other senses, to allow those senses to “stretch."
As I write this, I’m in the Village of Gamboa, a stone’s throw from the Panama Canal, in Central America. But whether I’m in my backyard in Maine, or in a Panamanian jungle, I like to consider myself home — if you can be at home in nature, you can be home wherever you are.
Photo by Dave Santillo
Gamboa is a beautiful area of majestic tropical forests, colorful tropical birds, and quiet homes that seem to transport you to the early 20th century from a time when the Canal was being built. I’ve been to Panama many times, and I can’t separate any of my trips from the context of being in nature….and at times your senses can be overwhelmed. As part of a study of land uses in a canal watershed that I’m helping with, the nature I’ve encountered on this trip has been in young forests, cattle pastures, tree plantations, pineapple and banana cultivations, and remote backcountry roads. Unfortunately, all of these plant communities represent disturbances in nature that are a result of deforestation for agriculture and agroforestry. Being able to perceive the human alterations of the landscapes you visit, understand the impacts of them on ecological communities, and be honest about our personal contribution to that impact is a worthy meditation for time spent in nature, and one I’ll revisit in detail in a future column.
The nature on this trip has sometimes been harsh, as in biting insects and stifling heat, and other time subtle as in the fresh air just before, or after, one of the soaking “green” season rains. But when you spend entire days outdoors, as you probably know from camping trips, you experience ebbs and flows of energy and activity, and countless small moments that amass into an engaging novel of natural history.
Stumbling onto and accepting what nature offers “in the moment” provides some definite “in-your-face” encounters. Ants played a starring role in this trip, as they do on every trip to tropical areas, when you allow yourself to notice them. To famed scientist and author E.O. Wilson, ants were a major part of his inspiration and basis for many of his profound ideas on biodiversity. In his book “In Search of Nature”, Wilson invites you to “watch ants closely…and you will be as close as any person may ever come to seeing social life as it might evolve on another planet.” I was told that ants have been especially active this rainy season in Panama, and on a daily basis, ants established new nests, or new foraging paths around the house I was staying in. My son and I spent two days volunteering on an organic farm in the remote Darien Province, and in helping clear some brush within a small rice plot, we couldn’t avoid the stings of small red ants swarming over our hands and arms with each lifted branch! I also encountered the usual large number of leaf-cutter ant columns during walks. I hope at some point in your life you get the opportunity to watch leaf cutter ants in action. The sense of purpose and dedication to their seemingly single focus task of harvesting small cut-outs of live plant leaves to feed to the fungus they “farm” back at their nests (the ants in turn feed on materials produced by the fungi), and sheer immensity of the operation – their columns seem to be endless – are worth dedicating a significant block of time to watch in awe.
Photo credit: www.drusillasinpictures.com
Experiencing nature in Panama can be as simple as parking yourself next to a hummingbird feeder. In the northeast, we content ourselves with a single species – the ruby-throated hummingbird. At nectar feeders in Gamboa, one can’t fail to be mesmerized and entertained by the aerial disputes and jostling at the feeding stations of white-necked jacobins, violet sabrewings, violet-bellied hummingbirds, and so many others.
But back to the topic at hand: increasing awareness to experience the less obvious. This can be something you practice anytime you are in nature. Last month I discussed doing nothing as a way to increase focus, to prepare yourself to see more by removing some of the background “clutter” in your mind. Now you can begin to fill it with awareness by allowing each of your senses to take over. In future articles, I’ll concentrate more on ways to practice using each sense, and what you could experience. But as always, we need a simple place to start.
Lets call this exercise coming out of darkness, by going into it. With your sight challenged, it’s amazing how much you still see.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of this trip for me has been a nightly walk on quiet roads and paths in Gamboa, where I consciously practiced awareness of nature by impairment of the sense I rely most on – sight. In a few days, I’ll be practicing it back in Maine, where I no doubt will have to work a bit harder to have the senses stimulated, but with no less reward.
Night time in a tropical forest is anything but a sleepy proposition. For me, my sense of hearing is the first awareness to dawn upon me when I first walk away from the house lights. Tungara frogs, most active in the rainy season, sound off like electronic artillery from a 70’s-era video game; night-time birds called pauraques (related to nighthawks and whipporwills) call out a sharp ‘por-whEE-oo’ from the paths and roads in front of you, sometimes explosively flushing as shadows in front at your feet; howler monkeys appeal to your primordial primate senses as they call out from the tree tops in a flurry of barks, coughs, and howls; and the symphony of nighttime insects never fails to impress. A tougher challenge than concentrating on hearing things, is working to isolate one full second of actual silence!
Photo by Dave Santillo
Shifting my awareness to sense of smell, I don’t have to see the color to know when I pass by lush tropical flowers like red ginger, the red and yellow firecrackers (Exora’s), and a wide variety of birds of paradise (Heliconia). The ever-present smell of decaying leaves and organic matter, and pungency of rotting fruits that have fallen on the ground, alternately sooth and assault my sense of smell.
The sense of touch is somewhat subtle during a nighttime walk. In the rainy season in Panama, humidity skulks in during the calm of the evening, sometimes subtle, sometimes smothering.
The sense of taste takes a bit of a back seat when walking in a tropical jungle at night…except as “induced” through an overload onslaught of ones sense of smell.
Even though it’s a walk in the dark, it’s difficult to completely ignore the sense of sight, once your eyes adjust to the darkness. An occasional shadow of a bat or if lucky, an agouti, coatimundi, or capybara adds to the experience. On early fall walks, there is almost always the flash of lightning in some distant part of Panama – it is after all the rainy season – and the brief pulses add still-photo perspective to the streaming video of the rich jungle life that your other senses are capturing and processing.
I invite you to spend some time in nature, in the dark. No flashlights, no streetlights, no storefronts to hinder your exposure. Meet nature on its own nocturnal terms, moonlight or not, windy or calm, and set out on the journey of discovery designed to increase your awareness. With practice, you’ll be amazed at how enriched your time in nature will be when you “view” it using all your senses.
-Dave
Dave Santillo, Ph.D. is an outdoorsman, naturalist and adventurer who delights in approaching his relationship to nature from a variety of physical, spiritual, recreational and educational perspectives. He has a Ph.D. in Environmental and Forest Biology and has been lucky enough to be able to take part in a wide variety of studies of wildlife, fish, plants and insects for over 25 years in his professional life.
Got outdoor adventure stories? Send them along to us at: editors@spiritliving.org.
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