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I asked libramoon, a member of an online group, if I could post her words and my reply to them on my blog today and my request was accepted:

“In rereading this with the other jumble of thought/impressions from other readings today, I am wondering: Are what we think of as psychological “conditions” reactions to a social atmosphere that largely negates the natural? I am speaking of both the larger natural environment and the internal natural development of the individual. If we are stunted in development by traumatic events along the way which become defined by normative values which keep us stuck in an unnatural frame, perhaps we need to look to nature for a healthier framing and way out?

I am also thinking about the article you posted regarding pain. Pain is a symptom of something out of whack in the system. The social norm is to block the pain rather than look to restoring balance in the system. Is this part of the mindset that sees nature as outside of conquering man? Is this part of the mindset that honors bullying, control, power and victimization because we are defeating nature rather than honoring wisdom?”

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I was thinking about libramoon’s words last night and the post I wanted to write in response to them when I went to sleep last night thinking only one word as I passed into my world of dreams – NATURE.

I woke out of my sleep this morning with one single word in my mind in return – FRACTALS.

This thought was soon followed by another one:  Nature is nothing more and nothing less that SHARED INTELLIGENCE.

Then, as I wandered through my house in my still-waking-up state, pausing to open the curtains in my living room to let the morning light in, pausing to open the door to let all three of my eager cats in from their night of play, and on into the kitchen to start my pot of coffee, I had an entire phrase come into my mind:  “At this point in our specie’s evolution, human beings are ‘children of the half-light.”

Then, as I waited for my coffee, I opened my email to find these heart wrenching words:

Please read this reader response:

2010/02/05 at 5:58am | In reply to debbi irish.

comment by LilAdopted1 found at this link — CONTACT INFO page

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All of these pieces of thought were preceded by the November 30, 2009 Time Magazine (must read) article by Tim McGirk on our returning war veterans and PTSD-depression that I read yesterday as I ate my delicious lunch at our local laundromat café:

How One Army Town Copes with Posttraumatic Stress

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I am humbled by the rich display of humanity already presented here today in the stories presented in the words above that I have already collected upon this page.

When I read about FRACTALS I begin to wonder if this same explanation might apply to all of us as human beings within the realm of so-called NATURE as we simply exist:

“A fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,”^[1] a property called self-similarity.”

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I could go on here to talk again about how without the pristine perfection of the Alaskan homestead my parents staked claim to, without the purist life force on that mountain and valley land and my bonding with it I would not have survived my childhood.  I could talk about how at 18, after I was ‘put into the Navy’ by my parents and flew thousands of miles away from my home that I was completely without conception of what being a human being among humans even meant.

I could talk about how in my mid-twenties I was attracted to Native American teachings because I thought among those people I could AT LAST and AT LEAST find comrades that understood what NATURE was and what it meant to be so in love with that natural world that humans remained simply as diminutive representatives of the Life Force that sustains us.  I could talk about how disappointed I was to find that the forced assimilation-genocide our nation had used to destroy the People’s connection to Nature had been so effective that barely a trace of the Original Connection to the Natural World even remained alive.

I could talk about the PTSD article and say that our military is refusing to apply the two simplest measurements of both risk and contribution to PTSD-depression that could mean the difference between life and death, well-being and ill-being for our service people and their loved ones for generations to come:  (1) assess the dominant hand used by these soldiers which relates to how their brain hemispheres process ALL information, most importantly the information contained in traumatic experiences, and (2) accurately assess these soldiers’ attachment systems, which would then clearly describe how their body-brain was built either with or without trauma at its center.

I could talk today about how nature’s SHARED INTELLIGENCE might well save us all at this ‘half-lit’ juncture in human evolution.  If we ALL, all of life, is connected in one body, and if the accurate sending and receiving of communication signals all the way down to life’s molecular levels is what intelligence is all about, then we have given ourselves a most valuable tool to assist us in gaining the kind of wisdom our species now so desperately needs:  We have the technology of computers and of the internet.

This means that those of us who are so fortunate to have access to this world wide web of vital information have an unspoken obligation to use it – and use it wisely.  I believe we are doing that.

SHARED INTELLIGENCE means that we all, each and every one of us, have something critical to offer toward the betterment of life on this planet.  Right here.  Right now.

We are speaking.  We are reading.  We are listening.  We are thinking.  We are sharing.  We are learning.  We are sending and receiving signals between members of the body of our species in ways that have never happened before in the history of our species.

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While I certainly can’t say that it doesn’t exit, I can’t find the whole in the boat of my thinking.  Life continues to exist on this planet because information is signaled through communications between all of its elements – and that intimate fabric of life does not exclude human beings.

As I return to the top of this post in my thinking I note one single word in libramoon’s statement that most captivated me:  STUNTED.

Can we be, as libramoon suggests, “stunted in development by traumatic events along the way?”

I find myself wondering why it took me so many years to buy a bag of Hyacinth bulbs so that I could stick them into a pot of dirt and watch them grow into one of my most favorite flowers.  But this year I did buy them, and every day I watch them grow and develop.  In this case every one of the 12 bulbs is receiving the identical resources.  One bulb rotted.  Eleven are growing greener and taller every day.  I can see their sturdy outer leaves part as the bud of each one’s flower begins to form close to the soil.

Yet not one of the plants is the same.  There is one that is twice the size of the rest of them.  Standing at nearly seven inches it towers over the smallest which only yesterday showed its first greenery at all.  Given this band-width of normal development, what would have happened should any or all of them have suffered some degree of trauma in their development.

Do I compare the tallest and the shortest and the middle plants and say that some are stunted and some are not?  Or is it the truth that each separate plant is simply fulfilling its own individual nature by growing in the only way that it can – in its OWN way?

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The presence or absence of traumatic influences during human development simply signals through molecular pathways in the body what the condition of the world is like so that the growing body-brain of the infant-child can adjust and adapt itself in the best way it can to survive in, and even thrive in, the world it is being built for.

These beautiful Hyacinth plants I am watching are crowded together in an old plastic yellow colander I bought at our local thrift store.  The soil then has excellent drainage.  It sits in my kitchen sink directly in the even light provided by my west facing window.  I can carefully monitor the needs of this whole tribe of plants equally.  But nothing I can provide for them will change them into anything else other than what they started out being.

No matter what influences an infant-child’s development, no matter how much they have to adapt in their body-brain development to trauma, they will always come out of these earliest stages of development in the best way they possibly can.  Each one will always be a unique representation of their potential as members of our species.  But none of us, not one single one of us, can ever overcome the boundaries that make us human.  None of us can become something nature did not intend us to be.

And because of this we each represent the environment that made us in ‘natural’ ways.

Given the information in her earliest environment that my mother’s body-brain-mind-self had to work with (from both within and from outside her body), it is natural that my mother became who she was.  Given who she became, it is natural that the outflow of her condition would be what it was.  Given what my mother did to me during my development, it is natural that my body-brain-mind-self would make the kinds of adaptations and adjustments that it/I did.  There is nothing, to me, unnatural about any of this.

What happened to me, however, is that once I left my home of origin I began to look around me as I became a part of what libramoon refers to as a “social atmosphere.”  Before that time I simply had no points of reference either outside of myself or within myself that I could use for comparison.  I had no inner compass other than the natural one that I had been formed with.

My Hyacinth plants have no ability (that I know of) to compare themselves to one another.  It is only once the signaling communication that we participate in achieves some level of the ability to compare our reality with some other reality that the trouble really begins.  Before that time I believe we simply exist within the natural world in the same way that any other part of nature does.

Once we have reached what I believe to be an evolutionarily advanced state that allows for a point of reference, we enter an expanded universe of thought that includes the ability to CONTRAST some aspect of something to, with and against some aspect of something else.  Without a reference point, we cannot COMPARE or CONTRAST anything any more than my Hyacinth plants can.

The human ability to access reference points so that we can compare and contrast allows us to also form opinions as it allows us to exercise conscious choice.  Using these abilities does not separate us from NATURE.  Thinking is as natural as breathing once we have that ability.

And just as we humans breathe the same air that our planet provides for us, we think by using the same neural abilities that everyone else does.  True, my own individual lungs breathe in and exhale particular molecules.  True, my brain’s particular molecules are thinking my own thoughts as I go through life.  But at the same time these are sharing operations.  Nobody can tell me, “No!  Don’t breathe THAT air!” or “No!  Don’t think THOSE thoughts!”

My body can breathe without my conscious awareness.  My body can also think without my conscious awareness.  Again I return to another critically important concept that I see implied in libramoon’s writing:  MINDFUL.

I can choose to be mindful of both my breathing and of my thinking.  I can accomplish this because I have gained the evolutionary advantage point of HAVING a reference point.  While my mother could no doubt have gained mindfulness of her breathing, I’m not certain that in her entire life my mother could gain mindfulness in regard to her thinking.  In fact, ‘mindfulness’ is one of the primary concepts applied to recovery within the so-called Borderline condition because the ability to live a mindful life has been altered – I believe through early developmental trauma – in a Borderline’s body.

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I believe that the ability to obtain the ability to have a reference point within one’s self is an evolutionarily provided gift.  Having a reference-point ability gives us powers to discriminate, to contrast and to compare so that we can think in mindful ways.  I don’t think my mother had this ability any more than my Hyacinth plants do.

Does this mean that trauma stunted my mother’s development?  Is a plant stunted because it has no reference point and cannot compare and contrast itself to any other aspect of existence?  No.  Simply put, a gift is missing in both circumstances.

Our ability to think mindfully happens because we operate within a social atmosphere that feeds information back to us at the same time we have degrees of ability to receive this information even before we are born.  Information comes to us as forms of nutrients that build our body-brain just as surely as water, soil and light are nutrients that are building my Hyacinths.  These are shared natural processes.

If, however, a developing human being does not receive enough information about its own individual self-in-the-world, the gift of mindfulness will not come into bloom in the same way that if my Hyacinths do not receive the nutrients they need RIGHT NOW as they grow, they will not be able to form blossoms.  In this way, mindfulness is the gift of the flower of humanity.

In this way, also, I see that my mother was not stunted; she was robbed of the evolutionarily advanced gift of mindfulness.  She was not fed with the necessary nutrients within the social atmosphere of her infant-childhood to build a self that could in turn possess a viable reference point that she needed in order to accurately compare and contrast her own self within a world of others.  She could not, therefore, share a gift of mindfulness that she never received.

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My choice to mention both breathing and thinking together is not an arbitrary one.  Research on the human vagal nerve system is showing that it is directly connected to our physiological reactions to what we see ourselves ‘a part of’ and what we see ourselves ‘a part from’ as it regulates our breathing and our heart rate.

Reacting as ‘a part of’ stimulates the STOP arm of our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS).  Our heart rate and our breathing slow down.  We then find ourselves on the cooperative rather than the competitive pathway, or the prosocial one.

If we react with an ‘a part from’ reaction, our heart rate and our breathing escalate with stimulation of the GO arm of our ANS, or our fight/flight response.

In this way, I suggest that WE ARE WHAT WE BREATHE and the more conscious and mindful we can become about our fastest physiological reactions within our body the more mindful we can become about our self in relationship with the entire world we live within.  The STOP reactions we have release our breath in an exhale.  The GO reactions that we have catch us with an inhale.  If we can learn to pay attention to this most basic signal from our body, we can increasingly notice with mindfulness the orientation we are taking from our internal reference point – our individual self.

Even without our mindful conscious perception, our naturally constructed social species’ body-brain is continually evaluating our degree of safety and security in the world through finely tuned assessments about what belongs and what doesn’t – what is safe and what isn’t.  These are comparing and contrasting operations that our body has formed itself to assess so that we can increase our chances of staying alive.

The more traumatic our earliest environment was the more automatic and the less mindfully conscious these patterns operate within our body because we were naturally built this way.  As we experience a lifetime of mostly automatic reactions, our body itself has taken over the reference point position, not our conscious mind.

As we begin to practice mindfulness we are creating our own bloom.  We can choose to grow this gift even if nobody gave us this gift pro bono.  Traumatized infant-children are given censored, erroneous information.  The building of an ever increasingly mindful self requires access to and sharing of truthful and accurate information.  Because we are a social species, this growth always happens through give and take within a social atmosphere, even if that atmosphere mostly exists between our own mind and our own self in online exchanges with others.

The more we access, utilize, process and digest new information the less hold any trauma we have ever experienced will have on our mindful self, and the more we will grow and blossom into being the evolutionarily advancing people nature has intended us to become.  Mindfulness, the blossom of our specie’s evolution, concerns all the information about our experience that we can consciously share with our self.  Mindfulness defines the social atmosphere we create within our self with our self.  This is the area where our healing will show its greatest accomplishments.  “Go bloom, everyone!  Go bloom!”

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NOTE:  In consideration of the tendency for some people to think that humans are separate from nature and/or superior to the natural world, all this means to me is that the ‘a part from’ pathway has been chosen rather than the ‘a part of’ pathway.  The reference point of the self has compared and contrasted itself and has made up a thinking-based fiction that has nothing to do with reality.

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