Kaspa's Podcast: Wildness

It's Casper's Podcast. It's episode 3, and today I want to talk to you about wildness. I've got quite a lot of ideas about this, and I've been reading quite a lot about it, and I want to try not to get weighed down too much in theory, but we'll see what happens. I guess the first thing to say is, what do I mean by wildness? I don't necessarily mean scary, crazy, out-of-controlness. I mean complexity. I mean something that is often contrasted to domesticity or civilization. If there's order on the one side then there's wilderness on the other side. Wilderness, that's strongly connected to wildness to me, a place where nature prevails rather than the hand of man trying to create something, uh, not just ordered but to, to take from the system without giving back to the system. In Nick Totton's book Wild Therapy He suggests that wildness is often given as the opposite to domesticity, but actually that isn't quite true, because the domestic, the cultivated world, relies on the natural world, but the natural world, the wild world, doesn't rely on the domestic world, or the cultivated world. If human beings were to disappear and take all their tools with them, the natural world, you know, all the non-human animals, plants, and so on, would flourish. If the non-human animals disappeared, if the wildness disappeared, if the complex ecosystems of the world disappeared, civilization wouldn't stand a chance. So, Domesticity depends on wildness, but wildness doesn't depend on domesticity. It contains it, it creates it, it is what allows for domesticity. There is something more fundamental about wildness, about complexity. A while back I watched, oh, scientists from Yorkshire who used to be in DREAM, Brian Cox. Presenting a documentary about life, and one of the things he talked about was entropy and the laws of thermodynamics, and this essential fundamental truth of the universe that everything decays and everything is moving towards a sort of white noise situation where nothing will stand out. Everything that's ordered, even complex order is moving towards, uh, chaos. And not a complex, uh, lively chaos, but just a broken-downness sort of chaos. This is on a grand, grand, grand time scale, of course. But he said, if that— if the arrow of chaos, of entropy, is pointing in one direction, and that's the fundamental truth of the universe, there is an arrow that points in the other direction, and that arrow is life. Over time, left to its own devices, life tends to get more complex, more, uh, ordered, you could say, but in a complex way, not in a simple way. And for me, this is really exciting and interesting. It's like, oh, okay, so we know there is something about the energy of the universe unwinding when we think of these vast time scales. At the same time, the energy of life is rising. It's becoming more complex. Left to its own devices, life becomes more intricate. Ecosystems become more intricate. I just— I don't know, I think that's great. And that's the sort of wildness that I'm talking about, the wildness that gives rise to life and liveliness and spontaneity and interesting interactions and experiences. Wildness is antifragile, I've written down in my notebook. Antifragile was a book that I read a couple of years ago by— I should have looked this up— I want to say Nicholas Taleb. It was the guy that wrote The Black Swan after the financial crash of 2008, he said, with a question mark on the end. And he defines antifragile as a system that responds well to a bit of knocking about. So a plate is not antifragile. A plate is fragile. If you drop a plate, it smashes. Bones, to some degree, are antifragile. If you don't use your bones at all, very much, then they will tend to decay. Whereas if you put them under some stress, they will tend to rebuild themselves. May potentially even stronger than they were before. So complex systems tend to be antifragile. They can take a bit of a knock. They're adaptive. They're moving. They're, they're lively. Of course, if you do enough damage to complex systems, you can also mess them up. And certainly we are doing a great deal to affect the complex systems of the Earth at the moment. Who knows what the recovery of that will look like? Potentially it won't be such a good place for humans to live. Watch this space, so to speak. Nick Totton's book is Wild Therapy, and the connection between wildness and therapy is this phrase, trusting the process. I've also been reading, um, Isabella Tree's book Wilding, where they, over the last 15, 20 years, they've transformed Knep Farm down in Sussex from an intensively farmed piece of land that was on the verge of bankruptcy to, I don't know what you'd say, a nature reserve, a wild place where there's natural grazing, where there's complex biodiversity. And part of the way of doing this is through self-willed ecological processes. In the introduction, she says, "Rewilding is restoration by letting go, allowing nature to take the driving seat." And then later on, "Rewilding, giving nature the space and opportunity to express itself, is largely a leap of faith." It involves surrendering all preconceptions and simply sitting back and observing what happens. Rewilding NEP is full of surprises, and the unexpected outcomes are changing what we thought we knew about some of our native species' behavior and habitats. You could say something similar about good therapy. It's about observing, it's about letting the therapeutic process take is course. It's about trusting the process. It's not about imposing meaning or models or techniques. It's about allowing unspoken, unexpressed feelings and processes in the client to emerge. Things that are stuck in the frozen body, perhaps little movements that are trying to express something significant, things that our dreams are showing us, the things in between the words that we're saying. As we begin to allow this kind of movement in ourselves and in our clients, surprising things happened, and the outcome of the therapy may not be what we thought, but it's usually something that is creative and interesting. I can't really give any examples of client work, of course, because of the confidentiality, so you just have to take my word for it. I suppose I could say that I never imagined that I would be here in Malvern running a Buddhist temple of two— in a 200-year-old Georgian building with six long-term residents. That really took me by surprise, and it came from allowing myself to trust a bigger process, both my own internal process of letting go of stuckness and and defenses and allowing myself to become more in tune with— I don't know exactly— some deep meaning that wanted to be expressed. And also in terms of trusting the process of meeting different people in the world and trusting good causes and conditions. And there is a sort of— not a question mark, but there's something interesting here, isn't there? Trusting the process. Letting nature take its course. Surely everybody is letting nature take its course. We are natural beings when we're, we're human, but we're also animals. We are an example of nature in the world. So surely whatever we do is the natural world expressing itself. I guess that's true to some degree, but my experience is that When I look back across my life, there's been a process of getting unstuck, and the less, uh, both in a physical sense of having tension in my body, in an emotional sense of having tension and self-defensive self-preoccupation, anxiety, depression in my mind. And as that stuckness, as that tightness as that going around in circledness is let go of, and I'm moving into a space that's more creative, more wild, if you like. Not necessarily in a stripping off all my clothes, painting my body, and running into the street sense, but in the sense of more spontaneous, more complex, more interesting thoughts, experiencing a bigger range of feeling and emotion and meaning. There's a sense of being more intimate with the world, being more intimate with a process bigger than myself, of being a better dancer partner to the causes and conditions that life throws up at me. So I think human beings have a lot of this stuckness, have a lot of this going around in circles-ness. In Wild Therapy, Nick Tossen suggests it comes from farming, that this is where a lot of it started. We took ourselves away from the land in a particular way. We stopped seeing the land as something to work with and started to use it as a resource. That's something else Isabella Tree says in the— later on in the book. It's about working with the land rather than against it, and I think that's key a key part of this process for me, working with the causes and conditions rather than trying to impose, rather than trying to take without giving. And farming is one place where this may— process may have started, not from any sense of wanting to do wrong or meanness, but simply of this process of discovery of, oh, over generations. So the plant— the plants by the latrine tend to grow the biggest and the strongest. Or when we mix these things, you know, I don't know exactly how the whole thing unfolded. You can have a read of Guns, Germs and Steel for detail of how farming spread across the various continents, which is a book that I also recommend Anyway, a couple of things happened. One is that we became stuck in one place. We started living, uh, in community— in community, in close proximity to each other, in close proximity to animals that were living in small spaces. And we suddenly had a surplus of food. In the old days, before farming, to survive required intimacy. It required going with nature, acting with causes, and conditions, finding a way of working with rather than working against or imposing. And that meant that you had to know the other members of your community intimately and know the natural world intimately. Um, once farming came along, you could get away without doing that because there was more food to go around than before. I don't know exactly whether that all stacks up or not, but Nick Totton in Wild Therapy quotes several scholars who present that argument. Either way, whether you, uh, believe that there was a time before human beings were stuck and going around in circles, when we were doing less of that, or just that it's always been the case and there's something fundamentally self-defensive about our nature, here we are acting against nature rather than going with it. So this going with causes and conditions, I guess I would say it means— also means something about choosing good causes and conditions. In the therapy room, one of the things I attempt to do is be non-judgmental, for example, with my clients. I tend to become fond of my clients over time. They know that they're getting my full attention, or as near as I can give, high attention maybe, if not full attention, when they're coming to see me for the time they're coming to see me. Those are pretty good conditions for experimenting with letting go of stuckness and allowing things to express themselves that need to be expressed. In my spiritual practice, I orient myself towards the Buddha and have a sense that there is something in the world that, as I said, uh, in episode 1, I think has personality even if it's not a person. Quoting Paul Nitta, there is something that I can trust, whether that is something separate from the world, or whether it is the infinite world in all of its complexity unfolding, is open for question. I suppose from the point of view of Wilding, there is something about trusting the whole project of the universe itself, handing yourself over completely to causes and conditions. On a large scale, whilst also recognizing that on a small scale there are better and worse conditions to put yourself in. There are, are places where it's more or less likely that you'll be able to flourish, that you'll be able to find your own wildness and your own complexity and your own spontaneity. For me, getting onto the land is supportive of this process, is supportive of my own personal therapeutic process. My own spiritual practice, my own process of letting go and trusting. Even just yesterday, when I moved from the flat where I can look into the garden through these huge windows, into the garden in bare feet, and then sat on the earth with the slowly returning to green after a little bit of rain, grass around me, and the birdsong in the trees. Immediately there's a sense of connectedness and groundedness that I can sort of— I can evoke to some degree in a meditation practice, for example, but actually it appears naturally when I put my feet on the bare earth and there's nothing constructed between me and the ground. That's the reason I really enjoyed the silent walk up and down the hills that Kema and I did, 9 miles each way, a few weeks ago. Somehow my body relaxes when I'm in the natural world. Now I'm sure that isn't true for everybody, If you've grown up in a city, I guess the— being outdoors could be a bit frightening. There's plenty of stories of things going wrong in the wilderness to put people off going outside. But for me, there is a sort of a feeling of coming home that happens when I am in a complex ecosystem that is missing when I'm in the simple ecosystem of a house, simpler ecosystem of a house. I want to finish by saying something that occurred to me yesterday, which is that as a Pure Land Buddhist, I often talk about Amida Buddha quite a lot, who's the archetypal Buddha of acceptance, but I rarely talk about the Pure Land. And I think that's because in the Texts, it's described as a place of jeweled trees, but yesterday suddenly had a vision of the Pure Land as a complex place. The trees there, uh, they're not made of a single gem. It says they have ruby roots, agate trunk, crystal branches, gold leaves, silver fruits, for example. Each tree has a different combination of jewels that make it up, and the whole, uh, the whole sutra, if you read it or chant it, it presents a very complex picture. And I just suddenly wondered if there might be something like a memory of wildness, a memory of being on the land. At the center of this sutra. One of the things about the Pure Land is there's musical instruments that express the Dharma naturally. Well, Dharma is ultimate reality. There's, there's musical instruments that express ultimate reality naturally, and of course the natural world is doing that all of the time. I read a koan recently between two Chinese masters. Can you learn from the natural world? Can you learn from the spirits in the natural world? And the answer was yes, you can, but you have to listen with your eyes and look with your ears. The Dharma is all around us, but it's particularly speaking to us. It particularly speaks to me when I'm in the natural world. The Buddha left civilization and created a community of forest dwellers. And that's something that we forget sometimes in our Western Buddhism, in our nice warm carpeted temples and dharma centers. The Buddha created a community of forest dwellers, and in this image of jeweled trees in the center of the Large Pure Land Sutra, there I am wondering if there's a call back to a sense of that community of forest dwellers. Here is a mythical forest with a Buddha at the center of it, in the middle of a sutra that tells us to, in our meditation practice, in our recitation practice, to call out to that, to imagine that space, to evoke that space in our own hearts, to place our hearts in that space even as our bodies are placed in this space. So I'm just speculating if there might not be an invitation for wildness there. Amida Buddha is the Buddha of love, and for me, um, wildness is the universe expressing love to itself. It's nature intimate with nature. It's a complex its ecosystems, its biodiversity. It's beautiful. We experience beauty when we go in the natural world. So here in the temple community, I guess there's a mix of order and simplicity and straightforwardness and of wildness. We try to encourage, uh, growth. We try to allow ideas to come from any part of the community. And sometimes that's more successful than others, but it seems to be happening. We try to encourage creativity and spontaneity and create conditions where people feel welcome. And when people feel welcome, they tend to express themselves. They tend to allow the parts themselves that have been silenced to speak. And that more complex, more lively, more spontaneous way of speaking and moving and expressing ourselves is the inner experience of wildness that is supported by an external ecosystem of wildness that we often forget and neglect. So for me, these two things go together: cultivating wildness externally and cultivating wildness internally. And I realize, as I say, that that's a bit of an oxymoron. You can't cultivate wildness, you can only cultivate domesticity. What you can do is remove the fear. You remove the fear by trusting, trusting the process. Confidence, trust, faith is the opposite of fear. So this, uh, episode 3, Wildness, is an encouragement to myself to continue to trust the process, an encouragement to you to experiment with your own wildness, with letting the parts of yourself speak and be heard that don't usually speak and be heard. Satya Robyn.