Everyone has an innate need to be connected to the Earth somehow.
After all, without it, we're all done for.
So what makes people lose touch with it? And what causes so many people to disassociate from it all together?
Is it the "urban and concrete jungle effect" or is there something more nuanced going on?
Definitely something more nuanced, in our opinion, particularly anthropologically speaking.
People lose touch when there isn't enough health and touch, when they aren't congruent enough in their psychological and emotional reality. We all lose touch when we haven't been able to get connected to Earth, plants, animals, and ourselves well enough, for an extended period of time.
Most of the foods we eat are connected to and made of the Earth (artificial additives aside), so no one is ever totally out of touch. Getting back in touch a bit more is always best, as it can almost immediately stabilize any of us. There is nothing more stabilizing than a walk on Earth's floor.
Hence all the pacing and repeating going on out there, that is beyond us, within those who are feeling perpetually (subconsciously) insecure.
And watch a depressed human golf. Notice how differently they walk when they're out and about in those wide open spaces that are filled with Earth's greenery - Greenery that is often perfectly manicured. Isn't man-i-cured a perfect word for what's occurring in this specific frame of mind?
Many aspects of life are becoming too curated and artificial. Of course, there's always someone flipping their emotional lid anywhere, anytime, but we don't hear of much violence on the course, other than Happy Gilmore and Bob Barker's "The Price Is Wrong" scuffle (Happy Gilmore, 1996).
Rarely does anger get reciprocated on a course because it literally puts people on a course. It gives them a way to channel their psychology and hormones down a "fair way"; into and out of sand traps, then onto a grand green. Yes, maybe they get a little chapped when they chip a ball over the fringe, having to take a few extra hacks than expected and desired. But eventually, they get to take satisfaction and solace as they putt into the hole of a perfectly manicured green(ery).
What a metaphor! What a literal example of what some need in order to get back in touch with their equilibrium, psychology, us, and our Earth again.
Like many sports, it's literally a game that's played on a wide, green, and sprawling field, where the goal is to use a bunch of metal clubs and ball to work with and through our inborn defenses.
Our emotions, anger, anxiety, and the like, seem to move about more freely on that field, perhaps because it is there that we're fully connected to the Earth, on a kind of course again. After all, we are all just working with and alongside each others' energies, aren't we?
As they rise and fall, move and flow, we do the same with and against one another to varying degrees and ratios. So, we'd say it's safe to say how well we work together depends greatly on how well we're connecting to the ball, weather and wind of today, goal of the game, and perhaps most important of all:
The quality of our connection to the Earth and others on it.
So, why does it work so well? What is the necessary nuance we should be more mindful of in other scenarios?
Perhaps because it was intuitively built by those who needed it the most, it gets them, those who are in need of a fair-way, and a corrective, rule-based course, onto a plane where they *could get back in touch (or make a deal with what is really going on in front of, behind, and parallel to us) ...
No, not all of them will, nor is everyone actually good at golf. Some of us will always flare up and go off. However: Getting back in touch with themselves, others, their emotions, and of course the actual Earth is necessary for anyone to be able to continue moving in a better direction, together, with, and not against, everyone else, including themselves.
Sure, they make those fake grass, indoor office putting lanes that are mostly just there to collect dust or provoke a reminder to schedule that next tee time. But perhaps they too are yet another useful analogy and microcosm for explaining the fact that there just isn't enough tea (or tee) time to spend with each other and nature these days.
Certainly, it's safe to say, we don't have nearly enough time to spend relaxing together, anymore, because there's too much to do! There aren't enough minutes in the day to address what's really going on beyond our immediate reality.
There's not enough time in a day that's not dominated by obnoxious, ongoing obligations that take us away from the reality we need to address collectively and cooperatively and urgently.
All this is to say, we think it's wonderful when people get back in touch with nature and their own nature, in whatever way they can. We believe that being in touch is the only way people will truly understand the gravity of what is occurring in and around them, especially when it comes to the shifts in weather we're all dealing with now, whether we want to accommodate the reality or not at all.
No one can argue that shifting isn't occurring all the time; anyone can argue that there "just isn't climate change and global warming" as we understand and see it in their current frame of mind (that's fine), but as our climate and earth are shifting and changing in many ways, so is the growing reality that people are being affected by the changes, shifts, and overall reshaping of our reality more than ever before.
We're all being affected by it, and this no one can argue, deny, or ignore anymore.
People, plant, and animal survival = Our overall ecological survival. Our resource management literally requires movement, evolution, and collective collaboration. As a result, our reality often requires migration to survive.
So, if we are going to accommodate an ongoing humanitarian perspective and the crisis we're all a part of well, we have to seek to treat all people with the humanity we all deserve.
We have to acknowledge and develop the resources and systems that are necessary and needed to survive, develop, and evolve together.
And evolution does not gut or completely discontinue the programs that do help. Instead, we need to continue developing truly realistic, health-oriented and congruent minded leadership priorities that seek to help people pave a fairway for themselves again.
We have to prioritize helping people recover from the storms they've been through, the storms that they've often been pitched into and out of repeatedly, plus the ones they're about to go into and through in theory. We can, as we all know, help people get to where they'll be able to afford to golf with us again, eventually.
But, of course, helping them do so requires our reorienting, reprioritization, even rewiring of our relationship to our own resources, responsibility, and sustainability.
In the end, it truly boils down to who we are willing to view as part of our culture and future community.
After all, those of us who are fortunate enough to have a fairway with adequate resources around us in our immediate vicinity and community can, and should, develop systems that accommodate and assimilate, to the best of our abilities, without losing our own individual-collective sustainability, others. We'll all be better for it. It's the only way to be in consistent enough touch with our own nature and humanity.
We don't need to look the other way by ignoring others and not ask them to play a round with us!
We need to embrace our humanity and work to develop our existence and existing systems.
We need to appreciate the fact that the Earth connects and survives us all. It always has, always will. Now, it is simply up to us to see how the climate and Earth's shifting are trying to teach us how to move and manage our individual-collective equilibrium, resources, and survival as one.
... Instead of resorting only to otherness and "not my family, not my problem" attitudes; we need to recognize how problem evolving, together, makes us all better. If we do, we'll all be better off...
This, to us, is interpersonal evolution that goes with the interpersonal weather, no matter how stormy or dry it gets out there.
Ignoring this is unnecessary enabling of ignorance and antisocial decision-making that should be a thing of the past, though we know there'll always be a level of both in a collective society that is incongruent with who we can be if we would all simply work better together with, not without our survival top of mind.
We are particularly ignorant to the current of reality that we are dealing with, and is co-occurring - even accumulating within and around us, all the time, now, because sometimes, seeing the new reality, is just too much to ask of somebody who's feeling increasingly insecure but doesn't know why! To be wise is to know the whys and how-come, so that we can avoid all the whataboutisms.
(Say all that 5 times fast!)
With the current trajectory of change in our world, climate, and minds we're being pushed more, together, psychologically and geographically speaking, than we ever have before. We're definitely not being pushed away from one another (at least on a psychological and mythological level). So:
"Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose. And whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations - as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness - Nature pops up with her inescapable demands."
-Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies (emphasis added by us)
To that end, let's "golf" with greater collective consciousness again. Let's orient our selfs to our Earth, and to working together better. Let's reorient, be great, better, and kind to each other, again, and again, and again,