Seek Out Attractive Natural Beings
Tapping Into The Intelligence of Nature
Why Do People Head Down The Heartwood Path?
Those who participate in the Heartwood Path enhance their awareness of attractions outdoors. In time, their attractions often turn to strong feelings of love. While spending time in nature is soothing, the unavoidable witnessing of environmental problems make people fearful, concerned, and attracted to protect what they have come to love. When they see more clearly how their beloved beings and natural landscapes are endangered, their compassion, which may have previously been limited to their own family or to their own kind, grows to include all sentient beings.
With practice, those who go down the Heartwood Path are able to enhance their skills of compassion.
This doing for others makes them feel a sense of accomplishment, a feeling that they cannot match through conspicuous consumption or routine entertainments. As they do more to protect natural attractions, they become saint-like in their helping of others. To this end, the Heartwood Path puts one’s attractions on a positive course that leads to environmental sustainability and a powerful type of happiness described below.
Course Benefits
The Heartwood Path does not lead to the “common” temporary satisfactions that come from everyday entertainments and conspicuous consumption. Instead of these momentary indulgences, the Heartwood Path will lead you to find “uncommon happiness;” that is, happiness that is abundant, abiding, and authentic.
One way or another—by allowing nature to carry you where it may or by following the specific text and series of Heartwood Path Activities—those who follow the Heartwood Path will be moved beyond the ordinary and become uncommonly happy. And the world will become better off because you are making the necessary effort.
Something right here needs to be said about my choice of the word “better.” I am not married to any static, conclusive state that I need to perceive before I can claim success in all this bettering. It is rather a matter of my own intentions juxtaposed to what is necessary to get along with others (as in the making of ethics).
So what is required for something to be better?, you may ask. The answer is better is often a more heightened attempt to balance the recognition of individual uniqueness with always being supportive of the building of relationality. To work on being better is to work on being more aligned with others. Everything may not be physically connected, but it is still “better” to minimize “exceptualism,” individualism, and other “isms” and to maximize the co-creative making of ethical alignments. We live in a “pluralverse” of personhoods (including natural beings).
If you do not feel good about my use of the word “better” anywhere in the Heartwood Path, I welcome you changing out that sometimes loaded word for another less irksome choice: “beautiful.” If it is grating for me to say something is “better”, maybe it would be less annoying for me to say it is more “beautiful.”
As one does more to protect natural attractions, one becomes saint-like in one’s helping of others.
Why The Heartwood Path Came To Be
After working for over a decade fighting ill-considered water projects, preserving wilderness, and helping to build the safety net of environment protection laws, only to see our work jeopardized by a political change in Washington D.C in the early Eighties, I came to the realization that it will be necessary to change the hearts and minds of the voting public if lasting protections are to be secured. Despite this political change, I somehow kept my chin up and pressed on despite overwhelming odds.
When famed conservationist David Brower asked me to “write a piece” on how to prevent activists from burning out, and when I noticed that the numerous solutions—including meditation, yoga, and spending time in nature—were good for everyone (and not just for activists fighting burnout), the three decade-long effort to chart the Heartwood Path began.
We call those who follow the Heartwood Path “earthearts.” Join the effort to increase individual happiness by protecting the planet one person at a time.
When communing with nature for Heartwood Path Activities, keep your senses open for the experiencing of sensations that are “great;” that is, for perceptions that are out of the ordinary, fabulous, and substantial. Sensations that are special to you are only valid if they are “trustable;” that is, if you can count on their accuracy. Since the sensations we are looking for come from your own experiencing, they are undeniably true; that is, your own experiencing is producing perceptions that are indisputable.
Sensing in the Now of nature cannot be glossed over, for one’s experiencing is not speculative or deniable. One’s senses are accurate.
Experiential acts are undeniable facts.
There is a type of uncommon fulfillment that you can achieve that will be both good for you and good for the environment.
What you are told can be misunderstood.
What you read can be a lie.
Comparatively, what you experience with your own senses is undeniably true. And if what you are experiencing is something in nature you are privy to a fabulous source of time-tested intelligence. When what you are sensing is unusually positive and recognized as being really about your ideal future self the truth is considered by eartHearts to be great. For practice, say repeatedly “Just as the natural being is (insert a positive attribute) I am (insert something similarly great).
Fulfillment
There is a type of uncommon fulfillment that you can achieve that will be both good for you and good for the environment. What you have to do to achieve this abundant, authentic and abiding form of satisfaction is awaken to the nature of happiness. By this, I mean that a primary source of your happiness is not within you as a separate being but stems from your unyielding but largely forgotten connection to Nature.
To achieve an abundant, authentic, and abiding form of satisfaction, awaken to the nature of happiness.
This course of learning will take you to a very special place where your own happiness meets the world’s great need. Upon completion, if all goes well, you will awaken to a place that is, at once, full of gladness and marked by there regeneration of nature.
The Uncalled-For Yet Not-Uncommon Contention Against One Customary Component Of The Heartwood Path
Allow the natural being you choose for your Heartwood Path activity to become a personified image in your mind—one that has not only all of its own natural attributes but also the ability to engage in conversation. Here’s why doing so ought not be a reason for skepticism.
It will be important for you to remember as you proceed down the Heartwood Path that phenomena are not self-arising distinct entities. They are all formed, molded, and interpreted by a slew of natural senses (the same ones used by humans). These include seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching plus forty-nine more so-called natural senses that we will introduce in this writing, including, for example, the literary sense that allows one to read and speak. Together, these abilities to perceive—never missing in any interaction— “color” all that exists. In this way, all of the “natural objects” that one perceives are not immutable separate entities but are rather images contrived of the blending of their natural attributes and one’s socially-formulated perceptions.
Images of natural objects—whether in your nighttime dreams or in your daytime perceptions— are not mere psychic phantasms. Natural images are living beings that reside in nature, in our dreams, and in our awareness. Throughout the ages, humans have often evoked in these images the human ability to form concepts and to speak. Although it is not uncommon today to hear skepticism about non-humans speaking to us, humans have, over the ages, benefited from such conversations in their dreams, in their celebrations, and in their prayers.
I suggest that you continue and modify this tradition of interacting with personified natural images so that you may flourish—that is, grow and develop in a healthy way and maintain an environment that leads to success and happiness. In your Heartwood Path activities, respectfully attend to images that come from nature.
During your activities in nature, form a sort of bridge of awareness between your inner world perceptions and your outer world perceptions and to allow any image of a willing natural being found on this bridge of awareness to have the ability to enter into a variety of forms of give and take, including sometimes the human-like ability to have verbal exchanges. It is on this bridge of awareness, which is a blending of outer world “actualities” and inner world interpretations, that one engages in verbal communication with real world yet interpreted natural beings.
Remember that it really doesn’t matter if statements come from you or from your chosen attractive natural being because there is only a seamless oneness and any separations are delusions. Independent bodies or events are mirages. If real world natural beings come into your awareness as living images, interpreted by you as you see fit, you might as well, if it is helpful to you, let them be sensible and speak. And you will do well to listen and to return the conversation without dominating the interaction.
Much, if not most, of what you gain from the interactions you will have with the natural beings you encounter along the Heartwood Path will come to you without the use of the spoken word. The skepticism you may now feel about the plausibility of talking with personified images of natural beings will almost certainly fade as you proceed. Think of your conversations as important and worthy psychological exercises and not as literal species-to-species verbal conversations. And, in any event, as you will soon learn, much of what you will be asked to do along the Heartwood Path will involve only a little heady verbalizing and much more visceral and non-verbal sensing of attractive natural beings. So stay with us.
Wander In Nature Aimlessly Or Do The Activities
Both wandering in nature without an agenda and the Heartwood Path text will, in ways that are different and explained in the courses, give you the important food-for-thought you can use to help you flourish. Each of the Heartwood Path activities will suggest that you move outdoors and into a natural setting. Conduct each interaction with nature according to the steps outlined in the Start-up and Follow-up Protocol, as you see fit.
Doing And Processing Each Activity
Our Protocols are suggested actions. They are not mandatory, but they are important. Do not skip over them. The more you do, the better.
Follow your attractions. Do not over do it. More involvement will yield better results. By carefully following the Start-up Protocol prior to each activity, you will experience many helpful suggestions for how to improve your functioning by communing in certain ways with nature.
To receive the biggest impact from each waypoint experience, also use the set of recommended actions that follow each activity.
At most learning stations along the Heartwood Path, there is a Nocturnal Pilgrimage section. Here, you can receive food for thought, some of it intended to influence the content of your dreams. Be sure to continue your journey down the Heartwood Path at night by planting something of interest in your mind before you fall asleep, by learning how to influence your dreaming even as you dream, by learning how to find pertinent meaning from your dreams, by interpreting your dreams so you can receive more benefits from your Heartwood Path Activities, and by making thoughtful entries into your dream journal. You will learn how to do all of these vitally important tasks as you proceed.
Like the other actions recommended at each waypoint (Substack), sharing comments with others is a vital step towards your own personal happiness and the sustainability of the environment. Receiving comments about your posts is inspiring. Engaging with others online or in person further expands your knowledge. Commenting broadens your perspective. Sharing your Heartwood Path impressions helps you to make a difference in the world.
HumaNatureConnect Activity
Asking Is A Good Habit
As a psychological exercise asking the personified image of the natural being:
what it experiences about the topics of discussion at each learning station,
what it wishes you to know about the topic of the waypoint,
what does the topic mean in the natural being’s world,
how does the topic affect the environment or the world,
how might addressing this topic be beneficial, and
whether the Image of the natural being has any more answers or questions?
Be sure to write out the back and forth conversation with the image of the being about these topics. Do your best, whenever possible, to write in the present tense.
Be sure to begin the habit of always following your Heartwood Path activities with our Follow-up Protocol: The Natural Systems Reflection Process.
Nocturnal Pilgrimage
Shift Questions Into Dreams
Pick two or three of the questions you asked your attractive natural being and think about them before going to sleep. Then see if any pertinent answers pop up in your dreams.
Don Pierce, Pacific Coast.