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 !)