Nature, Joy & Well-being

I've just discovered Michael McCarthy, award-winning environmental journalist who's latest book I cannot wait to dive into - The Moth Snowstorm: Nature & Joy - as a lover of both nature and the essence of JOY, and inspired by this subject as it relates to wellness experiences.

'The Moth Snowstorm is unlike any other book about climate change today; combining the personal with the polemical, it is a manifesto rooted in experience, a poignant memoir of the author's first love: nature. McCarthy traces his adoration of the natural world to when he was seven, when the discovery of butterflies and birds brought sudden joy to a boy whose mother had just been hospitalized and whose family life was deteriorating. He goes on to record in painful detail the rapid dissolution of nature's abundance in the intervening decades, and he proposes a radical solution to our current problem: that we each recognize in ourselves the capacity to love the natural world.  Drawing on the truths of poets, the studies of scientists, and the author's long experience in the field, The Moth Snowstorm is part elegy, part ode, and part argument, resulting in a passionate call to action.'

'There can be occasions when we suddenly and involuntarily find ourselves loving the natural world with a startling intensity, in a burst of emotion which we may not fully understand, and the only word that seems to me to be appropriate for this feeling is joy.'

It's amazing how much reading someone else's depiction of their experiences & feelings make you realize your own - this sense of joy one experiences when connected with nature resonates with me so profoundly, as it is clearly in our DNA as a humanity.

'They are surely very old, these feelings. They are lodged deep in our tissues and emerge to surprise us. For we forget our origins; in our towns and cities, staring into our screens, we need constantly reminding that we have been operators of computers for a single generation and workers in neon-lit offices for three or four, but we were farmers for five hundred generations, and before that hunter-gatherers for perhaps fifty thousand or more, living with the natural world as part of it as we evolved, and the legacy cannot be done away with.'

When you let yourself truly submerge into the profound beauty of nature, the sense of joy and connection is almost overwhelming... the ultimate state of 'well-being.'

As the pendulum is clearly making its way around from our (less-conscious) tech and commerce driven times, there seems to be a profound universal calling right now to re-connect with nature, slowly reinstating this deep sense of joy which can bring a re-connection with oneself and each other.... can you imagine a world where everyone took the time to feel this joy & connection?

'Wellness' has become too centered in commerce and plaster walls - nature is the ultimate vehicle for joy, and well-being.   And, nature, the most valuable thing in the world is free, equally available to everyone who seeks it.  Nineteenth-century English nature writer Richard Jefferies writes to most eloquently... 

'The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendor of life, yields a new thought with every petal.  The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live. These are the only hours that are not wasted—these hours that absorb the soul and fill it with beauty.' - Richard Jefferies

 ( For a synopsis of The Moth Snowstorm, my favorite, Krista Tippett, interviews McCarthy on her On Being podcast - check it out !)

Leonard Koren, Bathing & Aesthetics Aficionado

I've just connected the dots - the founder of the cult 80's magazine WET (a periodical dedicated to 'gourmet bathing') was also the author of some of my favorite books on aesthetics (Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, and Arranging Things) - Leonard Koren (not to be confused with the late Leonard Cohen).  What a legend, and how obvious the man so poetically and artistically passionate about bathhouse culture is also so about Japanese-inspired aesthetics.  

He epitomizes (early) 80's Los Angeles / California counterculture .

Leonard Koren was born in NYC in 1948, and raised in Los Angeles.  He studied Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA, but became more of an artist. In 1969, he co-founded the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad, a mural painting group, and focused his own art on bathing scenes (17 Beautiful Men Taking a Shower and 23 Beautiful Women Taking a Bath). In 1976, Koren founded WET Magazine – a periodical dedicated to gourmet bathing, which was influential in the development of postmodern aesthetics.  After WET concluded, Koren moved to Japan in the early 80's, where he wrote several works on aesthetics, most notably Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, and produced a column on Cultural Anthropology for a Japanese magazine. 

Favorite Quotes :

'How do I define a great bathing environment?... simply, or rather not-so-simply, a place that helps bring my fundamental sense of who I am into focus. A place that awakens me to my intrinsic earthy, sensual, and paganly reverential nature. A quiet place to enjoy one of life’s finest desserts amidst elemental surroundings. A profoundly personal place, even when shared with other people, suitable for the most intimate sacraments of bathing.' - AK

'To bathe is to fall into step with your biological rhythms: in and out breathing, the speed of blood coursing through your veins, the slowness of tiredness. … The mechanical world of objective time – seconds, minutes, hours – is irrelevant here. Taking a bath properly requires being able to guiltlessly linger, hang out, and/or do nothing whatsoever.' - AK

'Like the costumes that are shed, the nakedness in bathing is psychological as well as physical. You get exposed to and touched all over by the same stuff you’re mostly made of. Water doesn’t recognize any one spot as prettier or sexier than any other. Water wants it all.' - AK

Undesigning the Bath.  Leonard Koren, Berkeley, 1996

'Why are most designers (architectural, interior or industrial) incapable of creating deeply satisfying bathing environments? This study strong visual appeal are antagonistic to a profound bathing experience. Extraordinary baths instead are complex and distinctly elemental; earthy, sensual and animistic. They are created by natural geologic processes by composers of sensory arousal working in an intuitive, poetic, open-minded manner. incapable of creating deeply satisfying bathing environments?' - AK

Arranging Things. A Rhetoric of Object Placement. Leonard Koren, Berkeley, 2003

'This book started out as an attempt to understand what made the arrangements I saw in a San Francisco store, Japonesque, so extraordinary. For years I visited Japonesque and enjoyed the unique arrangements of ceramic, rock, old wood, plant materials plus other sundry and eclectic objects and wondered what it was that gave them their imaginative vitality.' - LK

His other books on aesthetics, also inspired by Japanese culture : Wabi Sabi : For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers. The Flower Shop : Charm, Grace, Beauty, Tenderness. Which Aesthetics Do you Mean?

WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing was a founded in 1976 in Venice CA, following the success of a party Leonard threw at the Russian Banya on Pico, which was hosted in thanks to the volunteer models in his 'bath art' (photographic studies of people in unusual bathing situations).  It ran thirty-four issues before closing in 1981.

'The magazine espoused a post-hippie philosophy of pleasure-taking, silliness, sensuality and play'

(The Atlantic)  'The only binding principle for WET's editorial scheme,' he notes in his new book, was to 'give the readers something completely unexpected tinged with absurdity.'  WET ran pieces about cooking fish in the dishwasher, how to dress for the apocalypse, the latest in bathing techniques for non-human life forms, and the metaphysics of smoking a cigarette. 'Gourmet bathing was actually beside the point,' Koren says.  'Nothing was taken too seriously,' WET was 'a parody of enthusiasms taken a bit too far', an embrace of the sensual and absurd. Pleasure was its own excuse.'

'The world wasn’t crying out for a periodical on bathing when Leonard Koren introduced Wet magazine in 1976. However, Koren had the imagination and audacity to create his own world, and that’s exactly what he did with Wet'   

Kristine McKenna, music editor for WET from 1979 until 1981.

Soak, Steam, Dream: Reinventing Bathing Culture

In September 2016, as part of the London Design Festival, the (Zaha Hadid-designed) Roca London Gallery hosted an exhibition curated by Jane Withers that showcased a series of contemporary bathing projects and an archive exploring ancient bathing rituals.

'Communal bathing culture is experiencing a global revival,' reports Jane

Dezeen Magazine reports : Withers has travelled around the world to visit a wide variety of 20th century and contemporary bathhouses and saunas. In the last few years she has noticed a huge surge in popularity, with many new projects being built.

'In the latter part of the 20th century bathing went behind closed doors and turned away from the community,' she quoted 'But now people are beginning to rediscover old bathing traditions.'

According to Withers, many bathhouses have been used to revive communities, with examples including Peter Zumthor's Therme Vals in Switzerland and the recently completed sauna in Gothenburg, Sweden, by Raumlabor.

You can imagine what the Soak and Steam parts dove into...  I particularly liked the Dream part, summarized by 'Spa Rules '

1 High Experience > Low Cost / Bathers must be able to afford to use the spa regularly

2 Mass Relaxation / Warning : this is a communal experience area

3 Connection / Use your senses and explore the rooms through touch, sound and smell

4 Get Lost / Explore the sparsely sunlit building as you navigate the semi religious atmosphere

5 Outside In / Bathers are encouraged to relax in the elements

6 Laughter & Camaraderie / You must relax and discover your lighter side

'I think it will be quite slow moving for people to get their heads around a bathhouse as an alternative form of cultural and social space, but I think it certainly is beginning to happen' - JW 

Thank you Jane, for this beautiful celebration of bathhouse culture, helping plant the seed for a revival...

Now here's an interesting statistic...

According to the Global Wellness Institute's famed 2015 statistics**, the US has 4x as many spas as Japan, and 2x as many as China , but a fraction of fraction of the number of Thermal Springs.  Thermal Springs aren't even 1% of total Spas & Spring Spas in the US, whereas they are 15% in China and 73% in Japan.

And look how much money each Thermal Spring Spa turns over on average in China and Germany - $7.1M and $5.3M, respectively.  Clearly these facilities are well kept and highly celebrated.

What are we doing in America ??  So disconnected with the Source !

**(where's the update GWI ???? I can't wait to see what's happened since 2015.... )

The Healing Power of Sweat

Sitting in a sweat bath can be more vigorous than any physical activity - the heat produces an artificial fever and urges every organ of the body into action.  While outwardly relaxed, inner organs are extremely active.  The body is cleansed from the inside out through your body’s largest organ, the skin, and its excretion, sweat.  

Benefits include: improved circulation, organ stimulation and cleansing, elimination of toxins, skin regeneration, increased metabolism, mental invigoration and endorphin release.  

And one can enjoy this purification exercise while either meditating or catching up with a friend...  check, check !

While sweat bathing doesn't replace ones fitness needs, it is the ultimate yin to the yang.  Exert, rest, restore, exert, rest, restore..... repeat, repeat, repeat... balance, balance, balance.

Bathhouse as the New Church

The bathhouse is a social event, and a sacred shrine. 

Whether it’s a Finish sauna,  Russian banya, Turkish hammam, Native American temazcal or geothermal hot spring, unwinding in the steam-shrouded natural elements of water, fire, wood and stone, has been central to most cultures for centuries, as a meeting place for communal healing.

Historically, sweat bathing has been as common to people as the making of bread and the squeezing of the grape, enjoyed socially while enlivening both the body and spirit.  

The grand architecture of original Roman thermaes with their pillars, arcs and arches shows how highly the early bathhouses were regarded as religious places.  And like the church (or coffee shop or local pub), the bathhouse was always a place to come together. 

Bathhouse serves as a place for both inner reflection and community - a place where facades are stripped and egos are checked at the door - where purging through sweat provides a rebirth.  In our secular, wellness-driven times, bathhouse is the missing magic - potentially the best version of a modern church.

Health Through Water

The word ‘spa’ comes from the latin expression ‘sannus per aquam,’ or ‘health through water’

Somehow over the decades, its explicit association with water has been lost.  Especially in America, 'spa' is either a massage at a luxury hotel (which one might enjoy on special occasion) or the Koreatown baths - nothing in between.  At the luxury level, the focus has been purely on treatments and an individual experience - the water piece missing.

The healing power of hydrothermal and steam bathing is both proven and intuitive because it makes you feel amazing. Water is restorative, sweating is cleansing, and interchanging hot with extreme cold can be one of the most invigorating and renewing experiences for the mind, body and spirit.   This is the typical bathhouse or ’spa’ experience recognized by few today, but certainly it is a ritual which speaks to what we all want - the ultimate wellness experience which can be accessible for ritualistic practice. 

While thermal therapy and purification rituals have been celebrated as sacred by various ancient cultures for centuries since the Roman and Ottoman Empires, they have yet to find their way in mainstream America.

'The role bathing plays within a culture reveals the culture’s attitude toward human relaxation,' wrote historian Sigfried Giedion. 'It is a measure of how far individual well-being is regarded as an indispensable part of community life.'

As well-being finally becomes integral to community life in America, its time we introduce these powerful practices to our everyweek routine.