Nature, and the great outdoors, lead us to experience raw beauty. These experiences are healing for our souls and support our well-being. Being in nature renews our spirit and helps us to rediscover what it means to be human.
The following is a text version of this posting.
According to the US National Park Service, in 2022, over 312 million people visited national parks for recreational purposes. When you consider that the population of the United States is approximately 336 million, to learn that 312 million people visited national parks is an astounding figure. While the visitors to National Parks are drawn from around the world, the number of visitors to National Parks is nearly the same as the number of people who live in the United States. What is it that draws people to visit National Parks, to be in nature, and to experience some aspect of the wilderness?
Visiting National Parks is considered recreational. But there are many other kinds of recreational activities one can choose from: going to an amusement park, playing a board game, or reading a book. But there’s something about National Parks or other places where we can be in the great outdoors that captivate us. I suspect that’s because that time spent in the great outdoors isn’t just recreational but is essentially re-creational.
Nineteenth-century naturalist, John Muir, understood this re-creational aspect of being in the great outdoors and wild places. As Muir stated, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.”
What Muir understood was that when we take time to be in nature, we allow nature to be a healing source and strength for us. This insight is not unique to Muir. The importance of understanding and experiencing our own being as connected to the larger world is a foundational aspect of Eastern religion and philosophy. It’s found in Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Practices from these traditions that in the West we view as physical exercises like Tai Chi and Chi Gong are spiritual practices meant to draw us more deeply into nature. Ideally, they are practices done out of doors and facing the rising sun. In doing these exercises, the energy within us, the chi, is renewed by the energy of nature.
This ancient wisdom is being studied in new ways through investigations of the experiences of awe and compassion. Psychologist Dacher Kelter researches awe and human well-being. In his book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder, he explains that awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends our current understanding of the world around us. One of the ways people experience this kind of awe is in time spent in the great outdoors, like visiting National Parks.
Awe, the experience of being in the presence of something vast, draws us out of ourselves and gives us a glimpse of something much broader and wider about life. That experience of being in the presence of something vast, enables us to return to our sense of self in a way that is changed, broadened, and more whole. That movement is deeply spiritual. It is deeply re-creational.
We often think of nurturing the spiritual dimension of life in terms of spiritual practices like meditation and prayer. Yet, opening ourselves to experiences of awe as a disciplined practice is a critical way to experience the re-creation of who we are most deeply.