activating hope and the nature of gratitude

WORKING TO CREATE THE FOUNDATION FOR A WORLD WHERE WE ALL BELONG

Hosted By: Gayle Certeza, MA

iRewild Institute Thought Leader

15 minutes

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TRANSCRIPT

Good morning. My take on gratitude is the nature of gratitude.

I grew up in the province in Janssen in Mindanao, so we have the farm. So my childhood was spent climbing trees. We ran around in the farm chasing after our cows. Then I went to college, so in the last 30 years, the concrete jungle of Makati has been my workplace. And rushing to work every day, rushing back home. I settled down in Melinda for 30 years. So when I settled down here, I tried to live within places that more or less have trees. So this is a photo of that *photo of tree-lined street*.

So long after I finished school, I still live in Katipunan. And then we live in Laguna. But then again, even if you live near the trees, we are always too busy to take notice of nature. So that blurred *photo of blurred green* there is what I see of nature in the last 30 years rushing to work and from work. And that has been happening for three decades, until last March when all our world stopped.

So all cities closed, all countries closed down. And we suffered massive losses, loss of jobs, businesses, and opportunities. And like you, like a lot of people, I was stuck. I was stressed and I was depressed. And well, we had nowhere to go, we have to stay home. And work was uncertain. Like for example, in our case, advertising was leveled down. There are very scarce opportunities in advertising right now. So that leads to and adds to the stress. And then I can feel the onset of depression.

Depression and I go a long way. I had depression long before I knew what it was all about. I just thought this a deep and dark kind of sadness that they don't understand. It took a while for it to be diagnosed. And it's different. Sometimes it's okay, it’s easy, it's a light kind of depression. And sometimes it's very heavy. You don't know what's gonna hit you. So that's why at the onset, I usually like to sit down and try to think what I can do about the depression. So usually I have three antidotes for my depression. One is work. So either a lot of work or a very interesting kind of work, so that I will allow myself. Second is travel, and that's not open to us anymore. So either travel as a tourist or migrate to another country, which we also did. And the third antidote to depression is studying. So every time I feel an onset of a big depression, I would like enroll on to something. So like learning Emiko. So that's a lot of depression, or that's really a nerd thing. But seriously, that's how I deal with depression.

But all of these things were not available anymore, because it's a pandemic. So I was thinking the world is falling apart, my world is falling apart. But the one thing that I am very thankful for is that I was experiencing the lockdown in a place where there's a lot of grass and a lot of trees. So that made me happy. If there's one thing to be grateful for at the start of the pandemic, it’s that the place that I was in was full of trees and full of grass. And then I was thinking maybe I can cope better with this impending depression by immersing myself in nature. So maybe if I do that, maybe that can be a new antidote for depression.

So this is my Instagram feed before the pandemic *travel photos*. Then I was thinking I can put that same energy and curiosity and love to the place where I am stuck in. So, there you have it, that's my Instagram feed during the pandemic *nature photos*. Appreciation of what you have.

Appreciating nature is a tough thing. It's not natural for us, so nature is not comfortable. It's not the air conditioned office. I miss the air conditioned office. It also takes time and skill to be still. So the effort to not constantly check your email, your notifications, while you are in nature is something that we all need to work on. And nature is also a decision—you have to calendar it, you have to make time for it. So for example, the meteor shower. I put it in my calendar that I'm going to go out and wait for the meteor shower, which took like hours. Then it requires a change of point of view. But now when you have time, and you actually experience like the last two storms that are very strong. So you experience that a storm is both a beautiful and scary act of nature.

So the gratitude for nature, how can it help us? So I look to the usual suspects of poets and writers. The first one, of course, when you talk about nature, is Mary Oliver. She's an American poet, and, for her, gratitude for nature leads to self discovery. So she made the poem. This is, I think, her most famous poem, it's “The Summer Day”. And then the backstory of that is she looked and looked at the grasshopper. And then she described the grasshopper in the poem. So that's the first half of the poem. And I'm gonna read you the second half.

So “The Summer Day”. Mary Oliver says,

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I've been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last? And too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

So by looking at one wild creature, she turns to all of us and asks us, What are we going to do with our one wild and precious life?

She also made another poem, “Gratitude”. Here, in this poem, she describes nature. But once she describes nature, she asks the audience, “When you are with nature, what do you hear? What astonished you? And what was most wonderful?” And her last line says that “if we are with nature, it's like the gods would shake us from our sleep”. So that's a very beautiful way of thinking of why you should go to a park or place that there are trees because it just might be that gods will shake you up from your sleep.

The second writer that is so steeped with nature is Clarissa Pinkola Estés. She's a writer and a Jungian psychologist, a psychoanalyst, and she wrote this book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, and, for her, gratitude for nature leads to inner change. So to all of us, men and women, “Go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods, nothing will ever happen, and your life will never begin". So, for people like me, who spent 30 years going in traffic, going to the concrete jungle of the city, there's a part maybe that was stunted because we were not out in the woods, and maybe a part of our life didn't start to begin. She also said that when you are connected with nature, your life cycle, your personal cycle, will be connected to nature. So she said, “The psyches and souls of women [also men] have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place”. So that is the positive thing. When we are connected with nature, we return to a quiet, peaceful soul-place.

The third one is Joseph Campbell. So Joseph Campbell is a writer. He's a professor who taught the world about mythology. So for him, gratitude for nature is the joy of being alive. Mr. Campbell, to all of us, “When you look at a spider, when a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature. It's instinctive beauty”. What will come out is instinctively beautiful. So Joseph Campbell is asking us, How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive? So when a lot of our lives is stuck in traffic, how much of the remainder of that is spent in the beauty of being alive? So that's a question that we can ask ourselves.

And then for Joseph Campbell, gratitude for nature is a holy act. So this is important to me because, for 30 years now, I don't have a religion. But it's not just that. I think the pandemic dealt us a blow to all our lives, that even those with deep faith are shaken. So maybe we can turn to nature and look. It's a holy act. So what Joseph Campbell said is, “God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, ‘Ah’". So did you ever experience that, if you see a beautiful tree, and you just sit still, stand still for a few seconds, and you look at it and you feel, Oh, wow. But then this creature has been there before us and will be there after us. Wow, that's, that's divinity. And lastly, Joseph Campbell said, “In the Upanishads, it says that when the glow of a sunset holds you, and you say, ‘Aha’, that is the recognition of divinity”. So when you sit down and sit still and look at it, so you feel the divinity of nature enter the divinity that’s in you.

So all of gratitude in nature had examples that are all arts based, so I have one science based. So, according to science, the appreciation of nature is important for us. So they had a study. People who spent two hours a week in any form of greenery were likely to have better health and better psychological well being. So that's a study by Berkeley. Gratitude. So Yale came up with a study of 20,000 people, two groups. One group they would ask them to write gratitude letters to mentors, to family, to friends, and the other to just live their life. So they MRI’d everyone. People who were in the gratitude group, they experienced a lighting up in areas of the brain that's about reward, and empathy, and happiness. So, gratitude and nature, aside from being arts based, is also very science based. So back to the story.

So it was the start of the pandemic, and I can feel the depression coming in. And what I did is, looking backwards, that I literally walked the talk when it came to nature and gratitude. For months now, I have morning gratitude walk. So the morning gratitude walk, what I do is I bring this thing *shows a beaded bracelet* I got from Bhutan last year. So one bead, one thing to be thankful for. So thank you for the sky, thank you for the sunlight, for the trees, if it rained for the rain. Every morning, that's what I do. And I teach myself to calm down and breathe.

So, my situation has not changed. Months after, it's still the same. We're still stuck, work is still uncertain, some opportunities opened. But it's still uncertain for us and I have bouts of anxiety. So the situation has not really changed. But I believe that I changed. By being with nature all these months, I feel that I am more content. I feel that I have a more positive outlook. And I feel that I am more connected. So our situations will not change for some time, we will be in this situation for a few more months.

Our situation will not change, but we can change our action or reaction to the situation. So we can involve nature in it. We can be a gardener. You can go out and admire the bees and the butterflies. Go. Go for it. Or you can put it in your calendar; make a date with the moon and the stars, and you go out and you see the stars and you see how awesome our world is. And maybe when we all get to that point that we're connected with nature, then we can look at it with kindness, and we can lead beautiful lives, beautiful and kind lives, and lives that are kinder to nature.

So, because I'm a nerd, I will leave you with a quote from Albert Einstein. So Albert Einstein, in all his intelligence, said, “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better”. Thank you.