Mind and Body

“There is strength, freedom, sustainability, and pride in being a practiced dweller in your own surroundings, knowing what you know,” opens Gary Snyder, author of the essay Cultured or Crabbed (46). The strength and sustainability that Snyder refers to in his piece is echoed by bell hooks in her essay, Touching the Earth; and it leads to health. In her piece, hooks quotes Wendell Berry as saying that farming/working with the land defines humans as being “not too good to work without our bodies, but too good to work poorly or joylessly or selfishly or alone” (105). The physical and emotional well-being of each individual, according to Snyder and hooks, depends on his/her deep and rooted connection with the natural world.

“Deep Ecology thinkers insist that the natural world has value in its own right, that the health of natural systems should be our first concern, and that this best serves the interests of humans as well. They are well aware that primary people everywhere are our teachers in these values,” (Snyder 47). Primary people, in this context, refer to the indigenous peoples of the land as well as those who have spent their lives working with it and living amongst nature. These are bell hooks’ ancestors. These are blacks who spent most of their lives in the agrarian south during the times of slavery. Hooks explains that a love of the earth translates to a love of self (104) and the rich soil that she played in as a child was a source of life for her. Snyder and hooks agree that nature is life. Life is present throughout the natural world, thus being a part of nature is synonymous with being alive.

“Living so close to nature, black folks were able to cultivate a spirit of wonder and reverence for life,” says hooks. “Growing food to sustain life and flowers to please the soul, they were able to make a connection with the earth that was ongoing and life-affirming,” (105). Knowing that you and nature together yield food, the sustenance of human life, is a healthy outlook, hooks explains. According to Snyder, there are two kinds of knowing. The first kind of knowing is found in culture, where you, your family, and your community can do real work together, and refers to the things that ground you and put you in a certain place, (46). Conversely, the other kind of knowing requires one to delve completely out of his/her actual place and revert to “straying outside” for answers, (47). This second type of knowing grants freedom and allows humans to connect with the earth that feeds our bodies and souls. The way in which humans make that connection with nature is dependent upon what they do in it.

“Culture”, as explained by Snyder, comes from the Latin word “colere” which means worship or cultivate, (47). The fact alone that humans use the word cultivate when referencing working the land to yield crops, hints at its religious and spiritual undertones. Hooks describes how her black ancestors felt working on the land in a passage by Onnie Lee Logan, a slave who lived her life on the farms of Alabama: “We lived a happy, comfortable life to be right outa slavery times. I didn’t know nothing else but the farm so it was happy and we was happy… We couldn’t do anything else but be happy,” (105). This all changed for blacks when they moved to the North for material well-being (to earn a living in the industrialized towns); the shift away from the agrarian life-style on the farms to the harshness of the warehouses led to a deterioration in spiritual well-being, (106). After some time in the North spent enduring such a mind and body split, many blacks returned to the South; the return “home” in search of spiritual nourishment, a sort of healing, was deeply connected to reaffirming one’s undeniable connection to nature, (107). Working the land, according to Berry, provides humans with a way to experience a sense of personal power and well-being, (107). By being capable of creating your own food and being responsible for nurturing its growth, you are able to fully enjoy its ability to give back to you, to sustain your life.

Realizing that nature is what grants humans freedom is the backbone on which human health rests, hooks and Snyder agree. One of the most moving lines in Snyder’s essay comes when he is talking about how nature’s release makes the human feel: “Untied. Unstuck. Crazy for awhile. It breaks taboo, it verges on transgression, it teaches humility. Going out – fasting – singing alone – talking across the species boundaries – praying – giving thanks – coming back,” (47). Snyder wants us not to “become one” with nature but to hold our similarities and differences with nature in our mind, (47). He is challenging all of us to go forth into nature and lose ourselves for awhile and then come back and feel healthy and refreshed; even more challenging is hooks’ desire for each one of us to bring nature into our everyday lives and restore the balance of the planet but changing our relationships to nature and its resources, (107). Humans have more mobility than any other creature, it seems; we are able to move about by car, by plane, by train or by foot. Allowing yourself to venture into the wilderness and experience its growth, we can become inspired – our emotional health will, in turn, nurture our physical health.

Hooks quotes Berry again when he warns humans that only through repairing the broken connections we have with nature can humans be healed and it is in that connection that we find health. Berry goes on, “And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is.” When we lose that health, according to Berry, we create diseases and dependencies that only profit big businesses and we lose sight of the “direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving,” (107). These simple facts, simple connections, can make the world of difference, not just in the fight to sustain our planet, but in the fight to sustain ourselves. Snyder and hooks show us just how meaningful the human relationship with nature are – we did, in fact, all come from the earth. As hooks quotes Chief Seattle as saying in 1854: “The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man – all belong to the same family,” (105). The interwoven character of human and nature’s relationship is something Snyder and hooks’ essays both display; the two essays differ only in their approach to said claim.

Snyder’s piece mainly reflects on one’s individual journey into the wild, he talks about leaving home to “embark on a quest,” (47). Hooks spends her essay focusing on a migration of people away from, and eventually back to, the wilderness. Her ancestors were plagued with hatred in the slave-driven South yet, their move North led to the horrible misuse of the body in factories as opposed to on farms which led to the destruction of the mind and spirit, (106). Returning to the agrarian South led to a healing of the mind and body. Both authors use effective techniques that make the problem of lost-connections with nature seem like a widespread epidemic. The only way to deal with the problem, according to both writers, is to start with yourself and your individual presence in nature.