Our painful path to heal in nature
Psychologists or doctors advise their patients to spend more time in nature. To recover from anxiety, burnout, panic attack, or any disease, as if nature can heal everything magically.
Recently, people have been searching for nature and paying a fortune for healing retreats or hidden natural paths to treat their modern health issues, many of which are located in far-flung jungles or on the edge of craggy coastlines. Social media advertising aggressively shows up polished pictures of the wild path or the meditation group in the middle of the Amazon Jungle.
The belief that nature can heal everything is purely exploitative, just as spending to "buy" a spot in nature is the original thought that monetizes the natural world and gains wealth from it. In the West (and those who submit to the same idea), where the philosophy of exploitation approves humans as the "dominion" of all species [“and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (Genesis 1:28)], one has the urge to spend generously cultivating the treatment that nature offers.
However, the journey to healing body and mind in a spectacular retreat might be the reason for the surrounding nature to be wrecked. For instance, you can ask where your toilet paper went, or how the management brought all the food, gas, chemicals, and laundry system to this forest to serve your healing path.
Paying for a room hidden in a jungle means paying for the industrial excavators to scrape off the forest and pave the concrete foundation for that healing resort.
Dreaming of a spa pool looking out the side of the mountains encourages builders to cut down all the trees and make way to that dream pool on the hilltop. The healing goers have motivated the healers and healing makers (or developers) to destroy nature at a faster pace to sell more spots into nature.
Lifestyle people coming to Bali to "heal" by reading a cheesy love novel pay generously to be in the land of spiritual living. Their money has helped the Balinese to chop off all the green jungles left to facilitate yoga centers and retreats.
Those who read Robinson Jeffers, a famous American poet in California advocating for nature, might not know that the man asked a developer to build a stone house for him in pristine nature to admire nature. Imagine every poet loving nature needs to build a stone house like that in the middle of nowhere; we would have thousands of arrogant stone houses (or we already had) to declare our love for nature.
Hardly anyone believes that nature is free because access to nature is often blocked and kept away from the public. On Malibu beach in the US, its tricky beach access is blocked by multi-million-dollar houses. Mountains in Chile are fenced in hundreds of km to prove their ownership to the settlers. High-rise hotels inundating the cliffs with beautiful coastal or mountainous scenery in Vietnam belong to government-related conglomerates.
Those in power enforce that nature is not free; you must be wealthy to deserve it. Henceforth, access to healing should be expensive, and you should trust that your payment is worth it to recover your deteriorating health.
On the other hand, many people don't believe they can touch nature and feel it. Worse, some don't and never are capable of experiencing that.
A lady came to Mexico and rented a small house. She told us she loved the nature there. She could hear birds singing in the morning. She could smell flowers from the neighbor's garden. She had lived in a big city for a long time and hadn't heard bird singing.
"But do you know anything I can buy to chase the bird away and avoid them shitting on my porch?" She asked my Mexican friend. It was apparent for this lady to enjoy the benefits of the wild birds, yet she didn't want them to have access to her.
Once I read a book written by a climber. He wrote that he became a climber because he could go to the mountains anytime since he was a kid, and it didn't cost him any. He made himself capable of accessing the mountains to appreciate their beauty. This kind of human beings becomes fewer every year as the cities spread like infectious diseases, swallowing rare natural habitats left.
I would tell this straight, buying nature does guarantee you a seat in the healing journey. The mentality adds up the stress of another rat race which might have caused mental issues in the first place. It illudes people from their central issues and loads up the anxiety of wealth accumulation. As a result, those being advised to be in nature ended up spending more time slaving away to buy a package to the retreat that can't treat them from the disease of exploitation.
Nature is free.
Do you remember the first time your mother took you to the sea? At three years old, you screamed when the salt water touched your feet, and then you and your toddler friends would chase each other around on the sand into the water. You would have tasted the sea, bitterly salty, full of living energy. You might have chewed sand and then spitted out [your mom might have screamed out of worrying about you]. Nature is free as that, accepting you into its existence without asking you for the ticket.
When I was six, my dad took me to the jungle to find mushrooms. After the rain, the ground was muddy and sticky. I removed my sandals and stomped my feet deep into the rotten leaf layers. I grabbed a bunch of leaf compost and felt them smear through my fingers. My face was a mess, and my dad laughed so hard. We collected a basket of cat-ear mushrooms and white mushrooms. My mom made delicious spring rolls at home that night. Nature is free as my father's laugh and my mother's spring rolls.
When the jungle was razed to build hydropower plants, I could no longer collect mushrooms and play with muddy soil. I lost access to free nature. Some powerful institutions decided that the jungle could be capitalized on to make electricity.
The typical path to growing up is to forget how nature was free to us. We finally learned to rationalize how nature benefits us materialistically and how to earn wealth from it. We mark the price to other species. However, no matter how much money we earn, the number doesn't bring us back to the co-living traits we used to nurture as kids.
We cut the umbilical cords connecting us to Mother Nature, then we struggle to build back the disrupted connection. We forget how our tiny feet touch the ocean, how the mushrooms secretly appear by our walking path. That unconditional love. That quiet connection. The way of being has faded away. We want nature so much, yet we reject its access to our existence. We lose our imagination to reach beyond the limits of materialism.
The woman who enjoyed the birdsongs yet wanted to chase birds away doesn't deserve nature. The people suffering burnout or anxiety and paying for hide-away resorts and retreats do not deserve the call of the wild. They can't hear that call. They can't be healed. They are deaf to the pristine existence that used to be with them.
They have been bought so deep into the economy of exploitation, and they have been creating more motivation to destroy the wild path. No healing can happen based on capitalizing on the last refuges of natural existence.
(In Mexico, by the wild wind)