A Better Sense of Nature…

By Jacob Rodenburg

Our environment is a delightfully textured tapestry of sound, sight, taste, feel and smell.  But in our modern, technologically saturated world, we mainly use two of our senses – our sense of sight and our sense of hearing.  In fact, most of the way we experience the world today is squeezed into two dimensions and confined to a flat and glowing screen.  The sound we hear often emanates from a device or from our speakers.

With all our time spent in front of screens, we tend to forget that nature has graced us with incredible sensory abilities – senses that enable us to connect to the world around us in a deep and abiding way.  And in a way that technology simply cannot replicate.  Erich Fromm used the term biophilia to describe “the passionate love of life and of all that is alive.”  We were born biophilic, loving nature and practicing sensory awareness both deepens and strengthens this love.

Think about our senses as “nature’s pipeline” – you and your student’s most direct and immediate connection to the natural world. To soak nature in through our senses takes practice, mindfulness, and deliberation. Some people have argued that in today’s modern world with so much time in front of screens, we are suffering from a measure of sensory anesthesia – a dulling of our senses.