Wild Solace

Peter Norlin, the Executive Director of the OD Network, recently sent out this message:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

                                                                        –Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things.”

We’ve had a beautiful summer here in Michigan, and I’ve been reminding myself yet again why I’m so glad to be here, and not in Chicago, Nashville, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Killeen, Texas, or Kerkrade, The Netherlands-all places I once lived. Though I enjoyed every one of those places, it’s good to be home again. I grew up in Michigan, but for many years my life and work seemed destined to unfold in other places, and I felt pleased that it did. But gradually I began to notice the tug of psychogeography (the emotional phenomenon connecting us personally, deeply - and inexplicably - to a particular place), and I knew I needed to go “home” to a less urban place, with more trees and grass, and to the peace of wild things.

This poem has always been one of my favorites, and I find that it sings a different song, and in a different language, from last month’s poem, “we are running.” One of the reasons we run is to escape the anxiety that grips us when we think of a future filled with loss and grief. How do we tolerate the truth of an inevitable ending, and how, as human beings, do we cope with our collective responsibility for our larger role on this planet? Mercifully, the natural world is much more than a stockpile of physical resources. In its fullness-too often reduced to the flat, generic word, “environment”-it reminds us we are each a part of something much larger and infinitely more mysterious. And if we could find and nestle into our place, our home, in this “web of life” (Fritjof Capra’s phrase), we might also find an antidote to despair.

To “rest in the grace of the world,” and to taste its freedom, we must intentionally stand for its future. And to do that as OD consultants, we must step in from our necessary, chosen position on the margin to commit ourselves to defending the natural world. We’re in a unique position, since most of us are students of both systems and complexity, and the natural world is perhaps the most obvious - and fragile - example of a complex adaptive system. For many people, “doing something” about our environmental challenges-global warming, resource depletion, competition for habitat-means a call to advocacy. And thank goodness. But as a profession we can also “do something” by helping people to stop running in circles. Help them to ask the right questions. And help them to untangle the trapped world’s web of remaining choices so that they might see what can be saved. As experts in human systems and human process, I believe we can do this. And if we ever seek solace in a loon’s call, or in a forest’s majesty, or in the sound of waves lapping on a sandy shore, I believe we must.

Thank you Peter. Beautiful words. A compelling Imperative. What sustains?

Tags: Organization Development, sustainability, wilderness