For many writers, the act of observing nature has healing properties. Amy Liptrot found it from returning time again to the same spot, and feeling more aware each time of “the height of the tide, the direction of the wind, the time of sunrise and sunset, and the phase of the moon”. In turn, Helen Macdonald believes that “The world is full of beautiful and amazing things and just to know about them is an act of grace.” For others, evolutionary biology explains why we feel joy in nature. “We forget our origins,” writes Michael McCarthy in The Moth Snowstorm. “In our towns and cities, staring into our screens, we need constantly reminding that we have been operators of computers for a single generation… but we were farmers for 500 generations, and before that hunter-gatherers for perhaps 50,000 or more, living with the natural world as part of it as we evolved.”
Therapy and the nurture of nature (Fiona Macdonald, BBC Culture)
By Humanities Watch|2016-09-04T23:44:58-04:00August 16th, 2016|2016, August, Europe, health, History, Literature, News, poetry, U.S. / Canada, Writing|0 Comments
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