A Return to Connection

Perhaps when you miss out on a few connections early in life it is inevitable that spend the rest of your life searching for them. What if you missed most of them?
 It seems likely in many modern, disconnected cultures that few individuals receive all the connections in infancy and childhood that we intrinsically need as human beings.
 And, if you should be so rarely fortunate, trying to maintain those connections in a society full of less fortunate individuals is no mean feat.

From being advised to put new-born babies into cots in rooms away from their parents, to putting those children into public care and then into schools teaching them competitiveness and a need to achieve. From here many of us are on a trajectory to think about the self all the way until old age where statistics show you are likely to spend a heck of a lot of time alone and lonely. (Think about all the people who complain about having to do something for an elderly parent or send them to a nursing home to be ‘cared for’.)

I think as human beings, all of this time alone is unnatural. All of this learning to compete and to have at the expense of others is incongruent to our make-up.  Humans are social creatures. You learn to care and to be cared for in prolonged social situations, in families and communities.

Communities can and should be powerful networks of caring individuals. The strength of the community is the strength of the individual and vice versa. How many of us today live and belong to such a thing? Maybe you read about something like this existing in a south-east part of the country somewhere, but it certainly isn't where you are.

The indigenous people of whatever land you are from (if they still exist) are struggling to keep theirs alive after their lands, food/water sources, cultures and rights were taken from them.

The rest of us, many of us newcomers or living amongst newcomers are struggling to make neat a melting pot of vastly different cultures. Haven’t assimilated with your foreign neighbour? Racist! Sound familiar?

How can we not, on so many levels feel disconnected?

At a natural level, who in western society can sense the mood of coming weather, can tell what fruit and vegetables are in season, what behaviour to expect from local flora and fauna at any given time of year?

Who knows the origins of their food, their clothes, their furniture, their car, the fuel you use for home and vehicle, the destination of your waste? Who knows the people who lead your community, your city, your state, town and country?

In your employment, who knows really who they work for, the bigger picture of what your work achieves, where resources come from and the environmental impact of that use?

In our lives, how many neighbours do you know, how often do you spend more than a few hours with family, friends, work colleagues? What meaningful things are happening to them in their lives? We are strangers to our own lives, strangers to our own world.

Far too many of us live largely disconnected lives, working long hours for other people or ourselves and rationing with difficulty the other hours we have left for family, for friends, for community and often lastly, ourselves.

Years ago a safety campaign was begun by airlines encouraging individuals to look after themselves in an emergency and only then to help others.

I remember arguing passionately about this with my husband. I thought the campaign was right. How could you look after others I thought, if you took no care of yourself? My husband believed in self-sacrifice for the benefit of others. We both looked at each other as though we were mad. How can you think that?

Now I look back and believe we were both wrong.

 What I think it really should be is that if we could unequivocally trust one another, to look out for one another, then we would all be safe. You care for some people, your care is important to some other people and we are all part of a caring support network.

We wouldn't have to worry about the ‘me’ being threatened or give up the ‘me’ for the ‘you’. People are looking out for you and you are looking out for them. The plane goes down and instead of every person for themselves, we try and support and help one another (I’d like to think that as so often demonstrated in an emergency we actually do great things for each other that we might not normally do).

 But our society as I already pointed out doesn’t really teach community thinking. It is very good at singling us out from one another and making sure we stay malleable and disconnected.

How many people in our privileged society are victims of crime, violence, loneliness, serious illness, mental health problems, poverty and depression?

What if these various forms of suffering are from disconnection: from people, community, nature, creativity… from our own selves, and that even those various forms of connection have become disconnected from one another, compartmentalised.

I have been thinking on the idea of reconnection for a while and I would like to share some of my recent experiences and thoughts on the subject.

I have begun a journey of reconnection on a personal level that I have seen has a ripple effect far beyond its origins. The idea of ‘reconnecting’ isn’t an original idea of course. Lot’s of people from various cultures, philosophies and religions talk about it, but I do think it’s applications to healing society have been greatly understated.

For me ‘reconnection’ (to people and the planet) began like this:

Brought up in Australia by European parents, I fell in love from afar with the idea of England and longed for the day I could visit there. Fast forward four decades and I was able for just over a year, to live there with my family. After a very happy stay, I was contemplating our inevitable leaving on a solo walk one day. As I contemplated the reality of going away I felt this intense, clenching pain in my chest.

 All my time in England I had felt an ‘open hearted’ connection to the land and the thought of leaving, this idea of severance was causing me real physical pain. On my walk home, I thought on the whole experience, of my sadness of leaving and I concluded that I need not think of it this way. Instead I chose to think of my connection to England as cyclical, like circular breathing. I was leaving this spot but I would always remain connected. Cue lessening of sadness.

I admit this idea worked so well I thought I was a bit bloody clever at the time, like I had somehow by sounding all philosophical to dupe myself. What I didn’t realise was that my awareness of connection and disconnection as ideas would stay with me.

Fast forward time and I'm back in Australia, going for a bushwalk with a friend. It’s a glorious winter morning and I’m walking in a new area of steaming old eucalypts and bracken fern. The sun is shining in streaks through the mist and… I get this overwhelming sense of connection to the place; a feeling of ‘oneness’ with everything. Picture a dopey grin on my face. In this time and in this place I experience an expansive feeling in my chest. I get a great sense of belonging, of connection. I feel the sensation is unspecific to that place and to any one thing. It is a feeling of general oneness, as though perhaps I was ‘outside’ of something before and now we are reconnected. I don’t feel big or small or hear the sounding of golden trumpets: I just feel connected.

Later I thought of the feeling I had in England and I noted the difference between the two. England: clutching, squeezing pain in chest and fear of separation. Australia: joyful expansive feeling in chest, feeling of one-ness.

 Interesting I thought. Hmmm…

A friend of mine often goes for solitary bushwalks to be alone she says, to clear her head.

For some reason my mind caught on her words and I began to question that idea, question what she was saying and what she was doing/seeking.

I reasoned that if you feel comfortable walking alone and you love the area you are walking; it has not been my experience that you do  feel alone. You feel…connected.

We say we need some ‘time-out’, to ‘get-away’. But what if what we are looking for is really ‘time-in’, to reconnect?

Perhaps, I thought, we seek connection from all the disconnection we feel consciously or unconsciously we feel around us. Are we looking for something or do we want to stop looking?

The sense of connection I felt among the trees that morning wasn’t really unique. I have had been fortunate to feel similar plenty of times over the years. Years ago I would probably have said something like “Oh beautiful! I love this place.” That was the reactive exhale to the feeling. Now I am taking more awareness of what I think the feeling is. I don't feel like a witness so much anymore, but a part of what I perceive.  I am also very aware of the effect it has on me. For instance: If I experience a feeling of connection and then afterwards I write or paint something, people viewing my work often seem to feel something too. Vicariously they experience connection through my own. Your chest lights up, other people’s chest light up…it’s all very heart-glowing ET-ishJ

Furthermore, in my experience, I have found that connection is non-specific: I go for a walk, I feel connected, then I go out and I feel more connected to other people, to other places, to other experiences.

Alternatively I can meet with people whom I experience connection to and then go for a walk and feel connection more readily to that place.

I am using connection the verb as a noun. I like to think most people have felt connection if you think about it. Perhaps you called it love, spirituality, God, magic, Mother Earth, whatever. I think the important point is whatever you describe it as, it’s there for everyone. Connection if look for it is in as short supply as air and as owned by someone as the stars.

Personally I feel that if you feel the need to attribute the feeling to an external entity, it is only keeping us separate from it. Connectedness needs no qualifications, wealth, teachings, education or nationality. What you have or haven’t done, who you are matters not one iota. I guess all it takes is awareness that it feels natural and wonderful to experience and be part of connection, and that being disconnected is not a healthy state for us at all.

 So to further the idea I want to float: a million problems exist for humanity. Could the base cause be as simple and as complex as disconnection? Broadly, could they not all be termed ‘disconnection’?

 Do you see the elephant in the room? Perhaps to experience connection and to appreciate it’s importance you need to be aware of your disconnections? Or perhaps if you become aware of connection you begin to regrow yours?

 Because the beauty is I believe, how ever far away you have gotten you can reconnect. At any time and in any place (because you can always use your imagination if that is all you have left), once you are aware of your connection/s, your network can spread. And as your network grows, it touches other people and they become connected and seek to expand their connectedness and so on and so on. And maybe in this way, some time down the track we might all find ourselves on the ‘inside’, connected to everyone and everything. (!)

If our connection to everything is mended and we experience ourselves as a vast and powerful whole, how could we even conceive of harm to one another or to the planet?

 Many spiritual teachings advocate the idea of ‘non-attachment’; that if you overcome your desire for attachment to people, places or things you will have a heightened perspective. What I personally I don’t like about this notion is that it implies that you, as a self, are separate from other things. And that the separate entity that you are would be best to not be ‘attached’ to other things. Perhaps this is to teach to not ‘hang on’ to things as I did England which can cause pain, but I wish the idea focussed more on the ideal of our ‘connectedness to all things’.  In the idea of an ‘all-connection,’ non-attachment is irrelevant as is attachment. If you are part of everything and vice versa there is no ‘you’ and no ‘other’. We are all in it together as a whole. There is no need to avoid painful attachment, no need for ‘ownership’, there is no leaving and there is no loss.

Right now our vast disconnection might be felt as an unspecific lack. Maybe the answer to why we are here is a question that only arose after we separated ourselves from everything around us? Do we wonder what the point of nature is? How are we also not 'nature'? I just can't see people who are deeply connected to nature, to their community, to the weather and seasons saying "Yeah, but what's the point?" Maybe our general wants and pangs are just a yearning for reconnection.

If you sense that you are unplugged, you have been separated, consciously or unconsciously you are bound to feel abandoned, alone, unwell, unsafe, enfeebled, impoverished.

 But these words are just the labels language we find to express our separation. We will blame whatever condition we have known. You will feel it in your bruises and cuts, whatever they may be.

But for all of us it is a separation.
How many times a day, a week, a month are we all aware of this?

I watched a movie recently whose story was set on a farm. The activities of the farm workers centred on the farm and the passing seasons. I felt a real pang of what I called envy.

 How much I would like to have a life like that! Being part of a group of like-minded individuals working toward a common goal, out-doors, close to the earth, celebrating the bounty and supporting each other through the hard-times.
 Since I had farming in my family not so long ago I wondered at the time if there was some recognition of farming in my system. An ‘echo in the bone’.
Now I just think it was a longing to know the seasons, to have my life revolve around the rhythms of nature, to be part of a strong-knit community, to celebrate being alive.

 There are plenty of people who would describe the idea of connection as ‘love’. Because it is felt in the chest we might naturally associate the physical sensation of connection or disconnection with the heart but I’m not sure that it is. Perhaps love is what we call connection when it is felt towards another person, creature or place that we have come to know. But when I feel connection to creatures, plants or places I do not think of love, I think of wonder or admiration or appreciation or belonging. I do not think ‘love’ could sum up those things.

 I guess again the point is you can describe connection as anything you like. Perhaps we all experience connection with the range of feelings with which we feel disconnection. For example, if you crave connection with place, perhaps a ‘belonging’ is what you will feel you lack. If you desire connection to people, perhaps ‘love’ is how you would describe your connections or ‘loveless’ as your state of disconnection.

 I believe reconnection is a process. It is not a matter of a simple ‘shut’ or ‘open’ to all that is around us. In my own experience I have found that the more I ‘connect’, the more ‘open’ I remain.

 Perhaps at some point we might become ‘fully open’ and that’s it. You stay open.

 I don’t know. I haven’t gotten there yet!
In reconnecting I am not suggesting you experience a beautiful dawn or a tantalising melody and you drive home and the radio announces “There will be no news today as Brian/Beverly etc saw the sun come up and everything is now right with the world.”

I will say that through time connecting with nature, my disconnections with some people seem to be dissolving even without my focussing on them.

I don’t think reinstating your connection is a perfect process. Disconnection happened to us over a long and rough road. I'm sure there's a trip in going back. Difference is, now you know what you know and can take that with you on the journey. And it's now a conscious journey.

If it feels right to you, seek connection. Nature is the perfect place to begin, the perfect nursery for healing. The ego goes very squishy among the trees.  

Out there over the heath land, by the ducks on the pond, beside the anemone in the rock-pool and walking past the daisy in the cracked pavement; we can all use our senses to return to, to reconnect with what we were a part of all along:

Everything.