Why Connect Community to Nature?

I recently had an opportunity to be part of a group of trainees that will take nature-connection mentoring to a new level of public availability. When I found myself unable to join due to important prior commitments, such as TrackersBAY, Riekes Center, and Native Eyes programs, I was severely disappointed. Considering my emotional response, one of the mentors involved with the program asked, "what need would this strategy have met?" In other words, why so powerful a reaction? I didn't have a ready answer.

The training, like the Native Eyes program, would provide immeasurable personal growth. And last year of Native Eyes was, for me, all about personal growth. Self-actualization, or being fully alive in one's self, is a powerful draw to many on this nature connection trail. With the tools I received last year in Native Eyes, the help of Kamana Student Services, and my community network, I could keep up personal growth for a long time. So personal growth isn't the pressing need.

The training would also provide a definite role, a place in this community that would make use of my gifts and my learned skills. Public-schooled kids like myself, having been shunted from room to room all our lives, get barfed out of our institutions and into the world with glazed eyes. We wander, never having had the opportunity to develop our visions for life and our gifts that may manifest those visions. Understandably, I want to find my place, find my gifts and use them to bring my community and humanity as a whole back into connection with nature. But why do I want to bring others into connection with nature?

I've heard many reasons why people "should" connect to nature. They range from reasoning like "people will be more motivated to stop climate change" to "people will stop trying to kill eachother" and many utopian scenarios in between. True or not, these seem abstract and sometimes fear-based, using nature connection to avoid violence rather than move toward a future full of possibility. Reasons like that fall heavy on my shoulders, draining rather than energizing. So why am I still motivated to connect myself and my community to nature?

I remember my early journey through life in the city, my landscape of concrete and cars, and my gut-level need for nature. I see that need in the eyes of many others around me. I hear it in their words and voices. Remembering my journey, perceiving others' yearning for the same, I want as many people as possible to satisfy that need through a deep connection to place. But why do I need to be part of their journeys? Why isn't it enough that other more powerful mentors than I offer nature connection mentoring to the world?

At the end of all this wondering and reasoning, I've come to one conclusion. Nature connected people generally display certain traits, called the "symptoms of awareness" in Coyote's Guide. They tend to have peaceful minds, to be fully alive in who they are, to love people and nature deeply, to know how to be of help to others and the world, to have strong connections to each other as well as nature, to be energized and at play. I need to be around people who display at least some of these characteristics. I want my immediate associates, my family, my community, and the leaders of the world to display these characteristics. And I'm fascinated with the growth and discoveries that people make on this journey toward expressing the symptoms of awareness. I want to be part of that.

This, then, is the need that the training might have filled: the self-interested need to grow a community around me, for myself and my family, my friends and future generations, that consciously brings out these symptoms of awareness in people. That is the possibility that has drawn me back to Native Eyes for this second year.