Chaparral Wisdom
To celebrate the magic and beauty of Nature & the chaparral
Rediscovering the Magic in Nature – Giving your youthful innocence a chance to speak again
Do you fit into your daily schedule? Or are you an afterthought?
Nature can help.
Nature provides the space and clarity that allow us to experience the vastness, the texture of life that is difficult to find anywhere else. Nature allows us to cultivate the present moment. It reaches out to us to reconnect with our innocent, younger, unvarnished selves without bias, without shame, without all the layers of personality we have developed to survive our childhood and the society we live in.
Nature allows us to be naked without being self-conscious. Nature doesn’t care whether we think we are short, tall, skinny, overweight, blemished. Nature defines acceptance. All have an equal chance to enjoy the cool stream, to feel the green moss, to fall into a rocky ravine. The rhythms of life and death continue to flow regardless of our age, wealth, or identity. Guilt, insecurity, self-loathing, judgement have no meaning in Nature. We become beautiful in Nature because we are allowed to define ourselves, by ourselves.
No matter our personal connection with Nature today, our intellects and emotional selves have created filters, perspectives, biases, the cobwebs of life, that often make it difficult to allow the youthful love and curiosity for Nature we all have within to be fully expressed.
Think about the last time your busy mind was distracted, if only for a moment, by a bird sitting in a tree, or a flower blowing delicately in the wind. How did you feel? Wonder, awe, compassion? It softened you. That was the door of your childhood opening up ever so slightly, allowing your emotional self to speak again, like a gentle wind pushing away the cobwebs, asking your intellect to pause for a moment and allow your life to breathe.
For us to allow Nature to reestablish this connection, permanently, to make curiosity and compassion (as opposed to judgement and apathy) guiding principles of our lives, we need to form new neural pathways to replace the older, worn channels that have been directing our thoughts and actions for years.
Where once we thought adult brains were fixed, we now know that the brain can grow new neurons to repair damage, replace older neural pathways that no longer serve us, change to help us change. It takes conscious effort, practice, to form new channels, to no longer allow the older, easier path to determine our actions. But the practice is within our reach.
A Plea to Governor Brown. Please think differently so you can help protect us from fire, mudslides, landslides, flood, and drought.
After wandering through the Santa Barbara Botanical Gardens, one is struck by the huge boulders scattered about. Where did they come from? It shouldn’t be a mystery. The Garden is within a creek bed, right below a steep mountain range.
As is Montecito.
Did planning agencies and developers consider the story the boulders told in the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden prior to developing the areas within potential highways of mud and rock along the coast? Did they consider the severe danger that would present itself after a major fire removed the protective chaparral cover from the mountains above?
The heartache that happened in Montecito was predictable.
The 2017 Wildfires – How We Think About Nature and Fire
After the massive 2017 firestorm that hit northern and southern California, it is important to take a look nature’s relationship to fire and how nature has been characterized in the wake of what has happened. For this discussion, we will be focusing on the fires in Napa and Sonoma Counties, although most of what we write is directly applicable to the Thomas Fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties as well.
How We Talk About Nature. First and foremost, we need to reframe the discussion and consider the words we use. Nature provides beautiful habitats for a wild diversity of creatures. It is not “fuel.” Fuel is what we put into our cars and what heats and cools our homes. A dense thicket of shrubs offers the wild foundation of green for countless organisms from lichens to wrentits. It is not “overgrown.” The term “overgrown” can be used to describe our gardens and backyards perhaps, but it’s not an appropriate or accurate way to describe our wildlands, no matter how many fire or flood cycles have been missed. Saying nature is “overgrown” is at best, derogatory. “Overgrown” is a highly subjective term based on hubris, not the needs of a woodrat, a Scrub Jay, or a ceanothus silk moth.
Words matter. Due to the loaded terms that are continually used to describe the natural environment, it is no wonder that a significant number of politicians and members of the public either fear or distain nature and see no reason why we should protect it. To them, terms like fuel, overgrown, brush, and dead trees, have become bludgeons to attack those of us who want to protect the rapidly vanishing natural environment and as an excuse to log, clear, and eliminate our public lands.
Natural Fire Return Intervals. The best way to determine what the natural fire cycle is for an area is to examine the frequency of lightning-caused fires.