“To understand anything—another person’s experience of reality, another fundamental law of physics—is to restructure our existing knowledge, shifting and broadening our frames of reference to accommodate a new awareness.” (Maria Popova)
We are storytelling people. We learn best with stories. Stargirl by Jerry Spinella is a gentle story that offers us a pleasant restructuring to broaden our frame of reference. A young adult novel, Stargirl represents an example of embodying a new awareness.
“’Did you see her?’Who could it be? A new student? A spectacular blonde from California?…‘Stargirl?’…And then I saw her. At lunch. She wore an off-white dress so long it covered her shoes. It had ruffles around the neck and cuffs and looked like it could have been her great-grandmother’s wedding gown. Her hair was the color of sand. It fell to her shoulders. Something was strapped across her back, but it wasn’t a book bag. At first, I thought it was a miniature guitar. I found out later it was a ukulele…She seemed marooned in a sea of staring, buzzing faces.”
There has been a lot of news recently, and not so recently, that seems to want to startle us out of our complacency and usher in a new thought or perspective, like Stargirl’s shocking entrance into a high school lunchroom. Then, like Stargirl, the perspective will creep under your skin.
“And each night in bed I thought of her as the moon came through my window…In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn’t the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert.”
The potential of the perspective shift is what Joanna Macy calls the Great Turning. It is the potential that we must turn towards greatness, and on a basic level survival. The risk, if we don’t adopt a hopeful perspective that the journey, we are undertaking will make a difference, is the unravelling of our world.
“An emergency is a separation from the familiar, a sudden emergence into a new atmosphere, one that often demands we ourselves rise to the occasion.” (Active Hope, 60)
Emergencies/crises require heroes. Heroes slay dragons, not lizards. Perhaps complacency is one of the dragons of our time: “if we learn about some disturbing information about an issue but see most people acting as if it is no big deal, then it is easier to believe the problem can’t be that serious.” Or perhaps it is the dragon of overwhelm: “In the 1990’s, I’d felt optimistic; I sensed people were waking up, that there was a growing determination to do something. But it didn’t come to much, and the problems we face just seem to get worse. I feel I must do something; I can’t just watch this. Yet there is some much that needs doing, I don’t know where to start. It is overwhelming, and I feel paralyzed.” (Active Hope, 64)
When we are asked, what can I do? The answer needs to be whatever you can. It is time to rise.
“In the Sonoran Desert, there are ponds. You could be standing in the middle of one and not know it, because the ponds are usually dry. Nor would you know that inches below your feet, frogs are sleeping, their heartbeat down to once or twice per minute. They lie dormant and waiting, these mud frogs, for without water their lives are incomplete, they are not fully themselves. For many months they sleep like this within the earth. And then the rain comes. And a hundred pairs of eyes pop out of the mud, and at night a hundred voices call across the moonlit water.It was wonderful to see, wonderful to be in the middle of: we mud frogs awakening all around.”
Don’t go back to sleep.
The ’20-5-3′ Rule Prescribes How Much Time to Spend Outside
Americans today spend 92 percent of their time indoors, and their physical and mental health are suffering. Use this three-number formula to make yourself stronger and happier.
I just felt . . . better. The biologist E. O. Wilson put what I was feeling this way: “Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual satisfaction.”
The joy of steps: 20 ways to give purpose to your daily walk
Has the novelty of a prescribed stroll long since worn off? From tracking animals to uncovering hidden history, here’s how to discover a new world in your neighbourhood.
The mental and physical health perks of exercise are immune to seasonal changes. We need to gallivant around outside in daylight so that our circadian rhythms can regulate sleep and alertness. (Yes, even when the sky is resolutely leaden, it is still technically daylight.) Walking warms you up, too; when you get back indoors, it will feel positively tropical.
The wonder stuff: what I learned about happiness from a month of ‘awe walks’
Feeling down? You need to experience more awe, psychologists say. So I set off every day to explore my local area, leaving my phone behind.
“It’s hard to think of a single thing that you can do for your mind and body that’s better than a little dose of awe,” he says. It was Keltner and a team of researchers who published a paper that found that awe can reduce stress, help inflammation, increase creativity and sociability and make you happy. “To me, that all says we urgently need to find awe.”
The Healing Power of Nature: How Walking in the Rain Saved My Life
“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” ~Nietzsche
A recent study by the National Academy of Sciences found that a ninety-minute walk in nature slows our worried, troublesome thoughts about ourselves and our lives. Even better, it reduces the neural activity in parts of the brain linked to mental illness.
Interlude
How we experience awe — and why it matters