“In 2010 a trio of researchers from the University of British Columbia published a paper that reverberated through the social sciences. Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, the authors of the paper, challenged the way the social sciences had for a century made broad generalizations about human nature and behavior based on research on a narrow cultural subset of humanity –– what they called the “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic” — or “WEIRD” — societies. After reviewing a comparative database from across the behavioral sciences, Henrich et al. found that these societies not only were not representative of humanity as a whole, they were by many measures at one extreme of the bell curve of human variation; in other words, “members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans.” By many measures Americans were further out on the bell curve than Europeans; in other words, they were “outliers among outliers.”

― Carol Black

What does it feel like to read that you might be an outlier to humanity as a whole?

How have we become so habituated to our behaviours that we have lost the perspective to see beyond our funny little ways?

Carol Black’s quote is one of my favourites. It is one that I return to over and over again and one that I feel I have been searching for over many years; something that I knew in my bones, in my cell memory, in my nervous system, that my ancestors whispered to me in the winds: that this is not what we are made for. My system tells me to get outside, to put my feet to the earth, to listen to the plants. This is where the growth happens for me. All around I witness the incredible force of nature, from the subtle yet insistent systems of growth and death, to the dramatic gales that take down trees or a force of sound and light in a thunderstorm.

Is it “hippy” to want to spend more time barefoot on the land? It’s not for me to give it a title, for the very act of labelling such a way of being is, in itself a removal from the actual capacity to be connected to that which feels nourishing and right.

So call it what you like.

The closest I can get to labelling it is that I need to honour that which I feel more strongly in my system than anything else.

Do you need some clinical or scientific evidence to justify your sense of connection to nature?

Go ahead and help yourself to the abundance of studies that go to show that we cannot ignore it.

Carol Black’s full and spectacular essay “A Thousand Rivers” with the above quote can be read here.