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When I was a child, we lived on a farm and I played in the woods, creeks, ponds and fields—usually alone. The natural world was my companion. When I needed comfort or to make sense of things, sitting by the creek or in a tree helped. Insights came to me a lot. Occasionally I felt enfolded, like being wrapped in a big warm blanket. Whatever this was, it was natural and familiar, but unnamed. What gave me that feeling? Where did those insights come from?
I never heard anyone talk about this kind of experience. I never asked anybody about it either. Christianity was part of my day-to-day world, so at about age 9 or 10, I thought maybe this living presence was God. I tried to test that idea by going to any churches I could get to—to see if I felt the presence there. I never came to a conclusion about what that sense is, even after a lot of psychological and spiritual exploring as a young adult. Over time though, I began calling the experience itself nature intuition.
Now, after decades of occasional intuitive connections with nature, I’m wondering again what that presence is and how nature intuition works.
Nature Walks and Nature Intuition
Many studies show nature’s de-stressing effects on people. Contact with the natural world can help people be more resilient. It can make us calmer, more accepting of others and open us to a broader perspective on life. What a fabulous medicine! And it’s free. Usually.
But, is nature intuition part of this? I don’t usually hear anyone mention it. In 2019, at a forest bathing conference, Dr. Mark Ellison of Hiking Research talked about the effects of nature on people. He said Moses went to the mountain, Jesus to the desert, the Buddha to the Bodhi Tree and Mohammed to a cave. Wow! That gave me goosebumps—telling me in a bodily way to pay attention. This matters. Certainly, those guys got insight and inspiration in their natural world retreat!
In secular society too, Ellison pointed out, there’s DaVinci, Darwin, Lewis & Clark, Thoreau, Carson, Edison and Muir. Poets, painters, scientists and all sorts of people go to nature to think, question, reflect and be inspired.
It’s difficult to know what another person’s inner experience is like, so I don’t know if their insights and inspiration from the rivers and woods was directly intuitive or reflective or what.
Nature Mysticism
Anglican Bishop John Edward Mercer (1857-1922), in his 1913 book Nature Mysticism, uses the phrase “nature intuitions.” He said “mystic intuition and mystic emotion is dependent on sensory impression” (p. 3) while not being scornful of reason. Our physical senses are the substrate for this way of knowing. These experiences happen when there’s “contact between the inner and outer—a unio mystica—a communion between the soul of a man and the soul of the things he saw.” (p. 6)
Mercer saw insights from nature as direct experience, not tied to metaphysics or theology. He described it as “actual living communion with the Real, in and through its sensuous manifestations.” I still don’t know about the “Real” (which is a question of metaphysics) but I do see nature intuition as direct experience. No need for interpretation unless you’re trying to explain it to someone. This capacity is shared to some degree by all humans, yet even in Mercer’s day he says this ability was neglected or disparaged. “Rightly developed, the capacity for entering into communion with nature is not only a source of purest pleasure, but a subtle and powerful agent in aiding men to realise some of the noblest potentialities of their being.” (p. 4)
Sensing a Deeper Reality in Nature
What is it we’re tapping into with nature intuition? What is that presence I felt as a child?
From Mercer’s nature mystic view, it’s “a deeper reality behind the world of phenomena.” He refers to it as the “Absolute, the “Ground of Being,” the “Ground of Existence” and “Reality” or the “Real.”
It’s a world of “spiritual facts.” A fundamental substrate of which humans’ inner world and the natural world are both manifestations. That’s why we’re so touched by nature. We spring from the same source. We carry the same life force.
We can’t get to the Ground of Being through the rational mind though. “Mystical intuition,” as Mercer calls it, lets us see through the veil. It’s “a passing of the mind, without reasoned process, behind the world of phenomena into a more central sphere of reality.” It may begin with sensory awareness or emotion, even beauty.
As one way to describe it, he quotes the English nature mystic poet Wordsworth:
“that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on—
Until the breath of this corporeal flame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.”
How Does Nature Intuition Work?
According to Mercer, humans and the natural world are “sharers in the same kind of Being, and therefore livingly related.” Nature’s consciousness differs from our own though. “A tree, a cloud, a mountain, a wave—these cannot enter into what we call ‘personal’ relations with each other or with human beings.” (p. 25) Yet nature mystics commune with the natural world. But how?
Mercer said through the opening of our intuitive faculties and the stirring of our soul. When our inner receptors sense nature’s power and being in its own right, we are moved. It may be desire, sympathy, appreciation, joy or other emotions. We’re then receptive to nature’s influence which, like us, is anchored in the Ground of Being or the ultimate Reality. But there’s also activity within us–not just receptivity–a contemplation or reflection like a waking dream. Mercer says a deep consciousness plays gently “over the material which nature so spontaneously supplies.” (p. 15) It’s a state Wordsworth called a “wise passiveness.”
By way of example, Mercer uses an anecdote about a man lying on a creek bank on a sunny afternoon watching the water pour over the edge of a low dam. In that relaxed, lazy state, he felt “a sense of this deeper reality about to reveal itself in his mind,” a great mystery about to emerge (p. 5). But someone interrupted it by calling his name. Too bad, the example would have been more interesting if we got to know the mystery!
Anyway, in my experience, those kinds of momentous, earth-shaking revelations rising up have been rare. More commonly my intuitions are practical or philosophical guidance or insights about myself, relationships or society.
For example, at a time of major change in my life, when the direction was unclear and I was getting impatient, wanting the situation resolved, I was out riding my bike past wild blackberry bushes and I stopped to pick a few. The black ones, the ripe ones, were soft and fell easily into my hand. They tasted sweet. Picking a couple of red ones, the stem broke. And they were sour and hard. They weren’t ready yet.
I thought I was just picking blackberries. But a subtle sense of metaphor arose in me. The blackberries reminded my Type A personality who wants to bear down and get on with things that I needed instead to stay open and wait. The time wasn’t ripe. Forcing it, well…it doesn’t work.
For me, this was a nature intuition. Guidance from the natural world. The same experience may mean something different or nothing to someone else. But that subtle resonant sensing that accompanied the physical reality is a signal for me. Staying open to it is a way of being alive to the world, of letting the world, especially the natural world, guide me.