By Mark Kutolowski   April 15, 2011

What is Contemplative Nature Education?  It is an approach to growing in relationship with the natural world that engages the student on all levels of their being.  It engages body and mind, soul and spirit in the learning process, and recognized varying degrees of depth and interiority with which we can approach nature.  In the past eight years of teaching wilderness skills and naturalist studies, I've discovered at least four distinct levels at which we can engage with, and learn from, nature:

  1.  The Physical level:  Engaging with the physical level of nature involves using our senses - touch, sight, smell, hearing, and taste - to study nature.  It includes digging our feet into the soul, touching and smelling plants, and close observation of the attributes of a plant, an animal, or how water in a stream moves across the landscape.  The physical level is the level the natural sciences use to observe and describe nature.  This includes observation of single species, as well as the relationships between species (ecology) in nature.  Field studies and careful nature journaling are ways of engaging with the physical level, as is simply getting kids out running around in the woods throwing rocks and sticks.

  2.  The Relational level:  On the relational level, the emphasis shifts from observing nature as apart from ourselves, to learning how we relate with nature.  On the more physical level, this means not only knowing how to identify a plant, but also knowing its edible, medicinal and utilitarian properties.  It means eating or making medicine with the plant, or tracking, hunting and cooking an animal.  On the relational level, we understand first-hand our dependence on nature for our food, clothing, heat and shelter, and how to obtain these things from nature.  On this level, we start to understand also how we can relate to nature in a way that helps to heal and support the health of an ecosystem - we recognize and seek to improve our impact on the environment.

  On a more interior level, as we build relationships with nature many of us begin to experience 'being to being' relationships with wild things that resemble our relationships with other people (or domesticated animals).  We begin to connect emotionally with wild places and with animals and plants.  We may begin to communicate on an emotional or energetic level with plants (or animals), giving and receiving information directly with other species.  We come to experience ourselves as participants in an intricate web of relationships with the other beings of the natural world.

  3.  The Allegorical or Metaphoric level:  On this level, we begin to see in nature patterns useful for philosophical and/or spiritual insight.  This approach is very common among nature writers, from Henry David Thoreau to Terry Tempest Williams in our day.  On this level, the movement of water in a stream becomes a teacher about how to let go, and a fire becomes a metaphor for the purification of the heart.  Every aspect of nature, when engaged with at this level, becomes a symbol or reflection of a pattern of human life or spiritual insight.  In this level, we learn to 'read' our lives (both personal and social/collective) in the context of the messages 'spoken' by the elements of nature.  In ancient Christianity, this was called 'reading the book of Creation,' and nature was understood as a sort of 'second Bible' in which we could read about the ways of the Creator.

  4.  The Contemplative level:  The most subtle and spiritual level of relating to nature is the Contemplative level.  At this level, we begin to experience each aspect of the natural world as a signpost pointing towards the Infinite, or as a doorway through which, if we follow, we can enter into an experience of the creative Source from which all matter comes.  At this level, each 'thing' in nature is experienced as emerging from, and returning to, an Ultimate Reality that we can be led into through our relation with the thing.  In Christian terms, each aspect of nature can thus be seen as an 'icon' of God, a visible, tangible gate through which we may enter into communion with it's Source.  The contemplative experience of nature is a first-hand experience of the dynamic relationship between the finite, manifest, material world, and the infinite, unmanifest, spiritual world out of which the manifest world emerges and returns.  I have met many people who, with no religious training or background at all, have had this type of experience while on a wilderness solo.  

  A contemplative approach to nature education takes seriously each of these levels of relationship, and seeks to support the student in encountering and engaging with the natural world on all four of these levels.  It does not unduly value one of these levels as higher or better than the other, but sees each level as part of an organic, natural movement of the whole person in relationship with nature.  I believe that this integrated, contemplative approach offers a deep and powerful way to embrace the whole person, body and mind, soul and spirit in our study of the natural world.