Composition Forum 54, Summer 2024
http://compositionforum.com/issue/54/
Contemplative Rewilding
Abstract: In response to the increasing alienation from nature exacerbated by digital living, this course design presents an advanced composition “rewilding” course. Combining natural history writing, nature therapy research, and mindfulness activities, the course aims to reconnect students with the natural world. Inspired by Micah Mortali’s concept of rewilding and Barry Lopez’s exploration of inner and outer landscapes, the course emphasizes experiential learning. Through natural history writing, students develop attentiveness to the environment, fostering a sense of wonder and connection. By centering on our innate relationship with nature, rewilding becomes a transformative practice, preparing students for ecological literacy and meaningful engagement with the world.
While some people returned to the outdoors during the pandemic, many of us found ourselves confined indoors and on screens. Living much of our lives digitally may have exacerbated the trend of human alienation from the natural world, especially for young people. To combat that trend, I designed an advanced composition course that combines three areas of study: the genre of natural history writing, research on nature therapy, and mindfulness activities. Subtitled “rewilding,” the course practices returning in body-mind to the organic logic and experience of nature.
My rewilding course makes center stage our intrinsic connection to the land: mind, body, and soul. I believe we have done young folks a disservice by teaching them about environmental apocalypse without first connecting them to the land. Environmental educator Richard Louv agrees: “A focus on ecological reality is essential at the college and every other educational level, but its implementation carries the risk of promoting joyless ideology. A sense of wonder and joy in nature should be at the center of ecological literacy” (224). In this vein, personal rewilding is a restorative practice. It reconnects us to our most essential and reciprocal relationship: our relationship with the organic world. From there, from that love, we’re better equipped to do the hard work on the road ahead. As Barbara Kingsolver writes, “First of all, salvation begins with love. That’s not enough, but it’s a start” (xiii).
In my course design, I discuss my theory of contemplative pedagogy and highlight three assignment sets crafted to be mindful. The class also includes longer essays that gather together the components of thinking, contemplating, and genre writing practiced in these smaller assignments. However, the methodology of those assignments, while inspired by contemplative questions, is more traditional. (Those assignments can be found in the appendix of course materials.)
Developing a Contemplative Pedagogy
Courses that write about nature come in various stripes. To paint in broad strokes, there are literature-minded classes that analyze writers like Thoreau and lean into the expressive connection to nature. There are courses that stress ecoliteracy, teaching about nature’s ecological workings; these classes often focus on critical consciousness about environmental issues. There are also ecocomposition classes that treat writing as a “discursive ecology” and understand nature to be socially constructed (Dobrin and Weisser 115-116). While my course has some overlap with these approaches, it was not born of them. Rather, it came out of a concern for eudaimonia, a Greek word sometimes translated as “human flourishing.”
I began developing a curriculum related to human flourishing in 2016. My first few courses in this vein felt familiar: students read texts analytically and rhetorically; students wrote papers analytically and rhetorically. Eventually, though, I realized that I needed to switch my pedagogy—switch how class discussion worked, how assignments were framed, and how I talked to students in conferences. This shift felt almost bodily, like I had to use my “brain muscles” differently. In hindsight, my switch echoes Darcia Narvaez, a moral and evolutionary psychologist:
I ask you today to listen with your heart, not to specific words as much as to their meaning.… Use your open-minded form of attention (right-hemisphere directed) rather than your categorizing/critical type of attention (left-hemisphere directed), which we all have practiced throughout our schooling. Your heart-minded attention is needed as I want to speak about our common humanity, our common home, the earth, and our relationship with earth and her creatures. (“Revitalizing” 223)
I began to think of my pedagogical switch this way: my students and I were learning how to inhabit the “knowing heart” in concert with the “thinking mind.”
Ok, that was step one: recognizing the shift. But what was step two? Despite my decades of personal contemplative practice, I was not sure how to facilitate contemplative inquiry in an academic classroom. I tried the reflective route, but responses were simplistic (“Everyone is different”) and mostly psychological (“I just try to do what makes me happy”). Slowly, I realized that reflective responses are limited if students don’t have experience in asking—and trying to answer—big philosophical questions. So, we studied existential psychology with Viktor Frankl and existential philosophy with Martin Buber. In my own accidental way, I stumbled upon what philosophers from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt already knew: the contemplative life is the philosophical life.
Twentieth-century philosopher Josef Pieper would have me qualify that statement, though. He sees a difference in method between two philosophical camps: modernity and antiquity. Kant, representative of modernity, “held knowledge to be exclusively ‘discursive’: that is to say, the opposite of intuitive…. According to Kant, man’s knowledge is realized in the act of comparing, examining, relating, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, demonstrating—all of which are forms of active intellectual effort” (Pieper 26-27). One can hear echoes of this idea in late-twentieth-century theories of language and social construction. On the other hand, the Greeks and medieval thinkers broadly understood contemplation as “the means to open one’s eyes receptively to whatever offers itself to one’s vision, and the things seen enter into us, so to speak, without calling for any effort or strain on our part to possess them” (Pieper 26). This form of receptive contemplation is, as Heraclitus says, “listening to the essences of things” (Pieper 27).
This dynamic of heart-and-mind-pondering-big-questions is, I believe, central to the process of contemplative pedagogy. Each discipline has big questions that shape its contours—sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. Questions like What are humans for? What is a world? What is memory? How does organic life function? What is the relationship between language and thought? Dwelling on big questions as open questions leaves room for wonder and for investigation. It makes space for thorough discussions. It can focus on understanding rather than persuasion (although persuasion has its place, of course). Dwelling on open questions can bring to light engaging paradoxes and ambiguities.
We might even find ourselves loving the subject of our classroom inquiry. As physics professor Arthur Zajonc points out, contemplative pedagogy has a long history, if we include traditional monastic education in the East and the West; this long tradition carries with it an “epistemology of love” (Love 1742). “Have you ever truly known anything that you did not love?” Zajonc asks. Helping us with the answer, he quotes Goethe: “One comes to know nothing beyond what one loves. And the deeper and more complete the knowledge, the stronger, more powerful and living must be one’s love and fervor” (Contemplative 92). Zajonc argues for an epistemology of love in our disciplines; in doing so, he identifies several features of contemplation, which include respecting the integrity of the other and intimacy with the phenomenon being studied. “Contemplative inquiry,” Zajonc writes, “is experientially centered in the other, not in ourselves” (Love 1746-7).
I think of these features as “habits of heart.” Our academic disciplines teach habits of the heart, whether we recognize or acknowledge it. Some of those habits are destructive, constrictive, and divisive. Zajonc argues that we can intentionally teach habits of respect, intimacy, and participation, rather than default to an “epistemology of separation” with its associated “ethic of violence” (Love 1744). Habits come out of practices, and Zajonc offers several fundamental practices that can be utilized across disciplines, including mindfulness, concentration training, and sustaining contradictions (Contemplative 84-7). Sustaining contradictions can be a demanding practice for an intellect schooled in binary and absolutist thinking. “Rather than seek to resolve contradiction,” writes Zajonc, “it is often better to maintain and even intensify the experience of how two opposites can be true at the same time” (Contemplative 86).
These practices can be at odds with the way our culture currently thinks. However, historical context can de-naturalize our contemporary disposition. Looking back in time, Zajonc points out, “In the Buddhist epistemology, [contemplative engagement] was called direct perception, and among the Greeks, it was called episteme and was contrasted with inferential reasoning, or dianoia. Knowing of this type is experienced as a kind of seeing or direct apprehension rather than as an intellectual reasoning to a result” (Love 1748). Zajonc suggests that this way of knowing becomes non-dual, such that “[w]e know by virtue of connection, not disconnection, because we are identical with the object of our attention” (Love 1748).
If habits of non-dual knowing seem foreign to our culture at this moment, they certainly are not foreign to our species, as Narvaez finds in her research. She argues that civilized culture has shifted our baseline: “An accurate deep history view of homo sapiens shows us that we have wandered off the species-normal pathway of raising good, virtuous, connected human beings” (Moral 56). Yet, we still have models of “the older more widespread view” of human nature—and human needs—in “the indigenous worldview” (Moral 56). That more human worldview, Narvaez argues, is grounded in thick social connection; it also assumes a symbiotic relationship with non-human organic life. This worldview motivated my rewilding course, which I will discuss in detail now.
Developing the Rewilding Course
My rewilding course grew out of an unsettling, but perhaps not surprising, discovery: my students did not know the contours of their organic habitat. This is a big issue because we have officially become an urban species; in 2008, “the World Health Organization reported that for the first time, more people throughout the world live in urban areas than rural ones” (Williams 11). Researchers are also finding that in places like the U.S., not only are we mostly in cities, but we’re almost always in buildings or vehicles—one study showed that amounted to 93% of the time (3). If we weren’t biologically made to be outdoors, this wouldn’t be a problem. But, of course, we—and all organic life—were made to be in the multi-sensory landscape that is nature. One might think that this understanding is intuitive.
However, research suggests that is not so, at least in societies lacking a strong nature-based culture. In a study in Ontario, psychologist Elizabeth Nisbet sent students to walk one of two routes: outside on a path along a canal or in tunnels between campus buildings. Turns out, students “consistently overestimated how much they’d enjoy the tunnels and underestimated how good they’d feel outside…. As Nisbet rather dejectedly concluded, ‘People may avoid nearby nature because a chronic disconnection from nature causes them to underestimate its hedonic benefits’” (Williams 3, italics mine). Additionally, plenty of research affirms the calming effects of time spent in predominantly natural landscapes, whether manicured or wild (see Kaplan; Valtchanov and Ellard).
This nature deficit made natural history writing a strategic choice for two reasons. First, it orients the writer toward the external landscape. For those not accustomed to paying attention to the land and wildlife, natural history description can be the beginning of that relationship. Second, mindfulness is inherent to natural history, as conservation biologist Thomas Lowe Fleischner points out. He writes, “Natural history is a practice of intentional, focused attentiveness and receptivity to the more-than-human world, guided by honesty and accuracy. Simply put, it is paying attention to the bigger world outside our own heads” (Mindfulness 5-6).
“Rewilding” pushes the experience further. I borrow the term from Micah Mortali’s book Rewilding: Meditations, Practices, and Skills for Awakening in Nature. He writes: “Rewilding is actually a vast subject, and it can pertain to the rewilding of ecosystems by reintroducing species that were extinguished, such as wolves or bobcats, or to the rewilding of human life by exploring ways of connecting with the earth and living more in harmony with it” (8). This can include wilderness survival, or primal movement patterns (for example MovNat), or ancestral skills like fire building, or plant medicine, or wild food foraging. In my class, we concentrated on “personal rewilding, or the practice of mindfulness in nature, which connects us to our original natural or wild essence” (Mortali 8). I chose personal rewilding because, in general, my students don’t know the land, and even when they do, few connect it to their own soulfulness. Rather, they associate it with their fears of climate destruction.
Paul Wapner, a Global Environmental Politics professor, works under the same premise. Wapner believes contemplative pedagogy can help students, teachers, and activists manage their reactions to the overwhelming scale of environmental harm. The approach can dislodge our “presumptive certainty,” whether it comes in the form of “corrosive cynicism or starry-eyed utopianism” (Environmentalism 161). Displacing certainty returns his classes to a state of inquiry. The openness to inquiry is important, Wapner observes, because attitudes toward environmental issues have become overly goal-oriented, leading to a high-stakes mindset around environmental campaigns (Contemplative 74). Burnout and despair are often the result. As vitally important as interventions are, “environmental problems are not simply technical dilemmas, but existential conundrums. They demand our entire sense of self and species…. Taking the longer view lets one see that environmental engagement is not a series of battles but a way of life, and one filled with a combination of sorrow, joy, disappointment, and achievement” (Contemplative 70, 74). I see my rewilding course as one ingredient in that larger project of making sustainability a way of life—a way of being—for my students.
However, our way of life has increasingly narrowed to interacting with machines inside climate-controlled buildings. These reduced conditions can make the workings of the wild foreign to us. “Wild” is a term much contested in conversations about ecology and environment. I take my lead from Gary Snyder, who asserts that everything on the planet is “natural” because it comes from the planet in one way or another. “Wildness,” though, functions by a distinct logic. Snyder writes,
[W]e can say that New York City and Tokyo are “natural” but not “wild.” They do not deviate from the laws of nature, but they are habitat so exclusive in the matter of who and what they give shelter to, and so intolerant of other creatures, as to be truly odd. Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. (12)
Put another way, nature can be domesticated and manicured by human intervention. However, wild animals are “free agents”; wild plants are “self-propagating, self-maintaining, flourishing in accord with innate qualities” (Snyder 10). In the biggest sense, says Snyder, the quality of wild is “close to being how the Chinese define the term Dao, the way of Great Nature: eluding analysis, beyond categories, self-organizing, self-informing, playful, surprising, impermanent, insubstantial, independent, complete, orderly, unmediated, freely manifesting, self-authenticating, self-willed, complex, quite simple” (11).
Assignment Sets
Snyder calls the wild “self-organizing” and “freely manifesting.” I cannot say that for the assignments in my course. They were as manicured as topiaries. But that needed to be the case because my goal was to integrate mindfulness practices, contemplative inquiry, rhetorical analysis, and genre writing. The long final paper asked students to reflect on outer landscapes that have inherently shaped their inner landscape while blending in the rhetorical elements of natural history writing. To get to this end, I developed three iterative assignment sets: mindfulness contemplations, natural world observation notes, and natural history essays.
Set 1: Meditative Embodiment
Encountering the wild requires an understanding—both intuitive and intellectual—of one’s own embodiment. In my rewilding class, I use meditations that connect phenomenological embodiment to course material. The use of meditative techniques is gradual and scaled for several reasons. First, students sometimes register for the course because it fulfills a requirement in their major. So, in the first self-assessment of the semester, I ask students what experience, if any, they have with mindfulness and how open they are to body-mind practice. This warns them about what lies ahead; it warns me about reservations students may have. The second reason that I start slowly is psychological: I have no information about students’ present or past emotional experiences. While I intend the contemplative aspects to be holistically beneficial, at the end of the day, my scope of practice in the academic classroom is intellectual—not therapeutic, not spiritual, and only secondarily social.
That gradual entry to contemplation begins with a conceptual understanding of natural history writing. We read Fleischner’s The Mindfulness of Natural History, where he lays the groundwork for contemplative observation of self and world: “Natural history and mindfulness are two surfaces of the same leaf, a seamless merging of attentiveness outward and inward, toward the interwoven realms of nature and psyche” (7). Fleischner notes that advocates of mindfulness have, at times, privileged the “interior reality” while neglecting the “essential permeability of the ‘self’ and [the] larger ‘ecological self’” (8). Practice at this threshold is central to natural history, Fleischner argues. With attention as a form of love, “natural history, then, is a means of becoming intimate with the big wild world” (Fleischner 9, 6).
Because interiority and intimacy can be intense (and sometimes awkward), our early meditative activities are done at home. During the first half of the semester, students listen to three recordings, each approximately 20 minutes, that carry a 600-word writing assignment composed after the meditation. These “mindfulness contemplations” are hybrid exercises that combine body-sensing, contemplative intellectual inquiry, and writing. They also lean into Robert Yagelski’s provocative question: “What if we conceptualize the act of writing not as the self thinking (as in a cognitive view) or communicating (as in a social view) or constructing itself (as in a poststructuralist view), but as the self being?” (107). For each recording, students settle into a quiet spot with a notebook at the ready. I begin a session with a body scan that includes sensing body parts, temperature, and texture. The goal is to foster recognition of the body without triggering trauma history, if there is one. As mindfulness practitioners know, feeling the body in stillness is important for working with the nervous system. However, in the context of my rewilding course, registering one’s physiological state is also a means of examining one’s ecological state, because our physiology is tied to conditions of the material world around us.
The recording then adds contemplative inquiry based on that week’s course content. For instance, when we read Fleischner’s essay, I ask students to respond in writing to the questions below. Students are prompted to listen for each answer as it comes up from the body-mind, rather than using the analytical mind.
In your body, what does it feel like when you are most at harmony with the living and non-living things around you?
How do you access your deepest level of knowing?
How does being in that field of harmony, how does accessing your deepest level of knowing, connect you to the living and non-living things around you?
This writing technique is indebted to Sondra Perl’s work on felt sense in writing. Perl writes:
Felt sense, then, is the physical place where we locate what the body knows. This knowing becomes clearer as words come. But more often than not, this knowing is present even before we have the words, before what we sense is expressed in language. The point here is that once we realize that we have access to this knowing in our bodies, we can learn to cultivate it. We can practice directing our attention to it. (par. 12)
In my class, felt sense is simply treated as refined observation, a skill we will also need in our explorations of the outer organic world. While it can feel deeply intuitive, we do not assume that felt sense is our “truest” knowledge; rather, it is simply one piece of the epistemological picture.
As students get comfortable moving among analytical, rhetorical, and contemplative approaches in class, the recorded mindfulness contemplations grow in complexity. The body sensing progressively moves from exteriority (e.g., the soles of the feet) to physical interiority (nasal passages, ear canal). I also incorporate simple breath awareness in the form of rhythm (slow and steady). From experience, I know that breath work can be instantly calming for some novices, but can trigger panic in others. I balance the breath awareness with a line-by-line reading from a course text. For example, I ask this series of questions based on Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild:
When have you noticed that the body has a wild life of its own? (Draw or describe)
Is the sensation of your body in space inside you, or outside you, or both?
Identify a sound around you. Where is the sound you hear? Is it at the source? Is it in your ear? Is it both? Is it neither?
How do you know—how do you already observe—that your hands and feet have their own consciousness?
How and when have you observed that the world is your consciousness?
As I ask a question, students are instructed to lengthen their exhalation, listen to their felt sense, and then pause the recording to write. We have already discussed Snyder’s concepts analytically in class, so the recording prompts them to now generate understanding via contemplation. By the end of the session, students will have the raw material they need to compose their short essays.
Because natural history has a visual element, the third recording revolves around visual composition. That week, I lecture on sacred geometries. We discuss the idea that fractal patterns in nature are pleasing to our species (Williams 113); we look at mandala forms in various religions; we consider cultural artifacts like Chinese landscape paintings. The patterns of sacred geometry—whether the spiral of a conch shell or the ceiling of a mosque—can be pleasing to the eye when viewed and calming to the body when drawn. The final recording leans into both those aspects. After the introductory body scan, students are asked to focus on their forehead, between the eyebrows. In various traditions, this spot is depicted as a third eye, or a blaze of fire, or the location of a blue pearl. This internal gazing practice begins a more complex visual meditation, wherein students imagine a particular sacred geometry and meditatively draw it in their notebooks. While they are drawing, students keep their gaze soft and avoid reaching for visual distraction. Moving back into the body, I cue them to sense the geometric shape, whether that be in the boundaries of the body, in internal motion, or in sounds.
The recording then moves into the most complex breath work of the semester: box breathing with a geometric visualization. With eyes closed, students visualize two parallel lines. They inhale up one line for four counts and exhale down the other line for four counts. Eventually, students are instructed to imaginatively widen the two lines and add two more lines to make a box. At that point, they inhale for four counts, hold the inhalation for four counts, and repeat the pattern with the exhalation. I remind students that a four-count may not match their own breath pattern that day. However, it is important that they move toward longer breath counts (ideally a 6 count) that can beneficially affect their nervous system (Nestor 104). Next, students shift back into quiet exteriority, drawing squares in any repeating pattern that occurs to their hand. The last phase of the session prepares students for their composition, which is a page of drawings:
Bring into the mind’s eye a landscape feature from your wild landscape. (They visit this place every week for an hour.)
What sacred geometry do you see in that feature? What do you see in those designs? What do they evoke? What do they resemble? Draw and annotate those images.
As you can see, these exercises are intended to be calm, but also active. In 20 minutes, students move through several activities: a body scan, breath work, inquiry questions, and contemplative writing. The instructions often alternate between activities for two reasons. First, most students (like most people) are not prepared to sit still without distraction for 20 minutes. Second, the recordings attempt to integrate basic physiological awareness, contemplative wondering, and writing. This integration is an ambitious project that hits the mark with some students and is only a gesture for others. For students who have experience with prayer or meditation, they are surprised by the depth they find within. For students who unconsciously tap their foot through any class period, the body awareness is an epiphany. Once I have a sense of how students respond to the recordings, I introduce a few in-class meditations.
Set 2: Outdoor Observation
The recorded mindfulness contemplations aim to connect students to interior aspects of their embodiment. A companion set of assignments, called “outdoor time + notes,” links students to the embodied organic world. The learning outcomes for these nine weekly assignments are two-fold: to experience the physiological effects of time spent outdoors in organic areas and to practice observing the biological world in preparation for our natural history assignments. For context, we read a chapter from Florence Williams’s The Nature Fix that introduces Japanese research into nature and the five senses, biophilia à la Erich Fromm and E. O. Wilson, and the autonomic nervous system (17-31). Each week, students are asked to spend one continuous hour in a wild place. Students are encouraged to leave their phones behind, or at least turn them off. On a particular week, students may also be asked to concentrate on describing colors or to observe how their walking stride helps them know their landscape. The hope is that students will find a location that is wild by Snyder’s definition, i.e., a place that functions primarily by the imperatives of diverse, non-domesticated life. Nonetheless, most students pick places, out of convenience, that have a strong imprint of human management. While that choice is not ideal, students do begin to see green spaces around campus with fresh eyes, and they find the things impervious to campus control: squirrels, birds, crickets, and sometimes bunnies.
Set 3: Working in Genre
The notes from outdoor time become material for our natural history writing, which we undertake with an attitude of “sympathetic observation” (Norment 1). Early in the semester, I lecture on the genre conventions of natural history. Although an expansive and flexible form, natural history writing has identifiable rhetorical contours. Intrinsically epistemic, natural history is concerned with how we build knowledge about the more-than-human world. Natural history also focuses on the observation of organic life in its own context (i.e., not in a lab), where the naturalist can witness patterns and relationships on a landscape (Dayton and Sala 200). In an experiential form, the writer observes, describes, and classifies life at that particular location. The genre can be—and, in fact, has historically been—practiced by amateurs as well as experts. Fleischner points out that natural history is the “empirical foundation” of ecology, conservation biology, and wildlife management (Historia 1).
In our discipline, genre can be broadly understood as social action (Miller). Anis Bawarshi points out that “writing is not a social act simply because it takes place in some social context; it is social because it is at work in shaping the very context within which it functions” (70). In this way, Bawarshi argues that genres have “rhetorical ecosystems”; they become “habitations in which our social actions are made possible and meaningful as well as in which we are rhetorically socialized to perform these actions” (70, 72). In ecocomposition, it is often assumed that the social dynamic at play—even when writing about nature or environmental issues—is exclusively a human social dynamic. (After all, the birds don’t read our treatises, right?) Fleischner would correct us:
What is required to build a sense of human community? Mutual respect, an opportunity for positive social interaction, and clear communication. The same ingredients—frequent interaction, honesty, and a strong sense of respect—undergird a healthy sense of belonging, of kinship, with the fuller community of life. What promotes frequent interaction with and respect for non-human Others? The practice of natural history creates a forum for interaction with Others, encouraging compassion and respect, helping us discover passion for the world and each other. (Natural 14)
The distinction Fleischner makes is that natural history is partially an extra-linguistic practice, not simply a discursive genre form. The communication comes via presence, observation, and recognition. So, no, the birds don’t read birding guides, but presumably, naturalists establish some kind of relationship with the bird. Fleischner advocates for a mindful one, which is also a habit of heart.
In addition to field observation, the learning outcomes for our three natural history papers include a set of rhetorical moves: thick description, sensory precision, scene construction, and positioning of the observer. By and large, students struggle the most with description and their rhetorical role as observer. Therefore, in one of the natural history papers—these are again short 600-word assignments—we focus on key descriptive elements like color, size, shape, contour, smell, texture, sound, and movement/directionality. In another observation, I ask students to avoid both self-reflection and critical persuasion. Many of my students default, by training, to self-centric rumination or, in a different vein, argumentation. Fleischner challenges us on both counts; he suggests we let natural history scrub clean our vision of the world (Mindfulness 15).
The final natural history paper works with big questions in a contemplative mode. Paul Lawrence Farber, a historian of science, points out how field observation of nature unfolds into larger questions: “Many naturalists are drawn, consequently, to deeper philosophical and ethical issues: What is the extent of our ability to understand nature? And, by understanding nature, will we be able to preserve it? Naturalists question the meaning of the order they discover and ponder our moral responsibility for it” (4). While outdoors in a wild place, students consider this quotation from Robin Wall Kimmerer: “Nanabozho [the “Original Man” in an indigenous creation story] did not know his parentage or origins—only that he was set down into a fully peopled world of plants and animals, winds, and water” (206). Students both describe what they encounter on the landscape and how what they encounter—even when it is not a human—might have personhood. Considering whether other living creatures have personhood opens up rich, if challenging, avenues of thought.
Application in Other Curricular Contexts
For instructors interested in contemplative praxis, but not teaching a rewilding course like mine, I suggest a simple heuristic: attention.
To what does your course pay attention? Is it to thematic content, structures of argument, stylistic turns of phrase, commas? Whatever it is, how does your course pay attention to it? Analytically, probably—and that’s fine. But are there other modes by which to pay attention to that object of interest? To put it another way, how is your subject of inquiry already speaking to you, and what new ways of listening could you develop? Could you ask students in a class on voice in writing to attend to contours of sound and how voice desires connection, particularity, exchange? In the case of my rewilding course, I found that we needed to pay attention to human interiority and then organic exteriority and then blend the two in our advanced assignments. A course on technical writing with STEM majors might find instead that it needs to attend to audience, genre, and mechanics. At first blush, perhaps those things don’t seem to “speak” to you. Yet, if one listens closely, those rhetorical concerns all have to do with belonging in a disciplinary community, even the use of conventional punctuation. Could you have your students write in a mindful way about how and why they want to join their professional STEM community? Could you give your STEM students attentional activities that foster respect for their subject itself? As Zajonc writes, “[T]he first stage of contemplative inquiry is to respect the integrity of the other, to stand guard over its nature, over its solitude, whether the other is a poem, a novel, a phenomenon of nature, or the person sitting before us. We need to allow it to speak its truth without our projection or correction” (Love 1746).
Appendix
Abridged Course Syllabus
ENG/WRD 401 SPECIAL TOPICS IN WRITING: REWILDING
MWF 11-11:50 a.m.
Dr. Beth Connors-Manke
University of Kentucky
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This experiential writing course combines three areas of study: the genre of natural history writing, theories of nature therapy, and experiential mindfulness activities. Writer-naturalists like Aldo Leopold have long advocated for direct contact with the natural world in order to deepen one’s care for self and nature. Recent concerns about human health and environmental destruction have yielded renewed calls for people to reconnect with the natural world. Richard Louv has written about the necessity of time in nature for children’s emotional and physical health. Other researchers and naturalists have built a chorus of voices attesting to the need for people of all ages to reconnect to the land from which we all come. Human well-being, they say, is at stake. Practices like forest bathing have migrated from Japan to Europe to the U.S. Writers like Micah Mortali, in his book Rewilding, go even further, combining experience of nature with developed mindfulness practices.
Outdoor requirement: Along with the assigned writing and reading for this course, students are required to spend at least one full and continuous hour outside each week. This outdoor time should be in the most wild outdoor landscape available to you. Maybe you already hike in the Red River Gorge; great, that works. Maybe you do not have a car and need to find your wild landscape within walking distance; that’s fine, too. Below is a list of naturescapes relatively close to campus:
Matthews Garden (on campus)
The Arboretum (adjacent to campus)
Woodland Park
Ashland, the Henry Clay Estate
Lexington Cemetery
STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES
By the end of the semester, students will be able to. . .
articulate the conventions of natural history writing
articulate burgeoning theories of nature therapy and the context for this trend
dialogue with the texts of professional writers who are engaging in natural history
practice mindfulness techniques that are attuned to nature
research and practice observational nature writing
develop extended self-assessments of one’s own learning
COURSE TEXTS
Thomas Lowe Fleischner, ed., The Way of Natural History
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants
Tim Kimmerer, Venerable Trees: History, Biology, and Conservation in the Bluegrass
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Barry Lopez, Story at Anaktuvuk Pass: At the Junction of Landscape and Narrative
Lauret Savoy, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller
Vladimir Nabokov, Butterflies
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Florence Williams, The Nature Fix
Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia
Reading selections available on our CMS.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS + PERCENTAGE OF FINAL GRADE
Daily writing & self-assessments |
20% |
Mindfulness contemplations |
20% |
Natural history observations |
20% |
Walking essay |
10% |
Outer landscape essay |
15% |
Inner landscape essay |
15% |
EVALUATION
All assignments—whether daily work or large projects—will be graded pass/fail, with a high bar for passing. There will be no partial points earned for any assignment. (A late penalty will result in deducted points that are independent of the pass/fail grade. For example, a 50-point homework assignment may pass, but receive a late penalty, making the grade 25 points.) Each assignment will come with specifications for content engagement and for writing parameters. If an assignment does not meet all the specifications, the assignment will be graded “fail” (or, as our CMS labels it, “incomplete” or “no marks”).
R&Rs: You may revise and resubmit up to three assignments for full credit during the course of the semester. This excludes your final project due at the end of the semester. Revisions are due within 7 days of the returned grade or by a later date set by me. Choose wisely in using your R&Rs.
ATTENDANCE POLICY
You will be allowed three unexcused absences without penalty. However, on your fourth unexcused absence, you will lose 10% from your final grade. For example, if your final grade is 82% (B) and you have four or more unexcused absences, your grade will drop to 72% (C). If you are absent, you are responsible for the material you missed. Students are expected to come to class on time and stay for the entire period. Students who chronically arrive late or leave early will be asked to schedule a conference with me to discuss their attendance.
MAJOR WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
Self-Assessments | series of reflective learning assessments (300 words each)
The purpose of self-assessments is to develop insight into your own learning and to encourage self-efficacy, which is a person’s belief that they can be successful when carrying out a particular task.
Initial self-assessment
Please answer the following questions:
What goals do you have for your writing in this class?
Right now, how far away are you from those goals? (In learning theory, this is called the “zone of proximal development.”) What hurdles stand between you and that improvement? What are your plans to overcome those hurdles?
What experience, if any, do you have with mindfulness? How open are you to that kind of mind-body practice? (Please be honest.)
How do you imagine you can transfer your learning in this class to other courses and contexts?
Midterm self-assessment
Please answer the following questions:
Has this class been different from what you expected? If so, how?
Do you feel that you were prepared for the type of course work we are doing in this class? How/how not?
What have we learned or done so far that has been valuable to your writing?
If your learning and comprehension of our material is not at the level you would like it to be, what adjustments will you make for the second half of our course?
Final self-assessment
Please answer the following questions:
Looking back over the arc of our course, what is rewilding as concept or idea? (I’m looking for a robust definition with concrete examples.)
What have you learned personally about rewilding? Will what you learned shape your life moving forward? How so? How not?
Outdoor Time + Notes | weekly time spent outside & observation practice
The learning goals for these assignments include the following outcomes:
experiencing the physiological effects of time spent outdoors in natural areas
practice observing the natural world in preparation for natural history assignments
Week 2: Spend one continuous hour in your wild place over the weekend. The point of the outdoor time is to invite some of the physiological effects Williams mentions in her chapter 1. So, if possible, avoid taking your phone with you, or turn it off while you are at your wild place. Chill out and space out. Take relaxed notes about what you notice via your 5 senses. Those notes will be the raw material for our in-class writing on Monday.
Week 3: [combined with natural history observation #1]
Week 4: For this session, take relaxed notes about colors that you see. Those notes will be the raw material for our in-class writing on Monday. Do your best to avoid using these words: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. Instead, get some inspiration from Crayola.
Week 5: For this outdoor time, be in motion. Spend your time walking, ambling, strolling, sauntering. Let your stride be the way in which you get to know your wild place. As you ramble over the landscape, train your awareness on trees, bushes, scurrying animals, scrambling bugs. If there are buildings or machines on your landscape, try to erase them from your perception to see that land in its wild dimensions. Take relaxed notes to be used as raw material next class.
Week 7: [combined with natural history observation #3]
Week 8: Spend one continuous hour in a wild place over the weekend. For this outdoor time, find a place that has a tree or trees. Note the composition of nature and the built environment around that tree or grove of trees. What’s there? What’s not? Also consider what you know about that tree by observing it and what you may already know from prior learning. Likewise, what do you not know about the tree(s)? Take relaxed notes to be used as raw material next class.
Week 9: Spend your outdoor time this weekend in one of two ways: attending one of the tree week events on Saturday or dedicating your hour to the landscape that is the focus of your outer landscape essay. In either case, please take relaxed notes that are due Monday.
Mindfulness Contemplations | series of audio mindfulness practices
The learning goals for these assignments include the following outcomes:
develop keystones of mindfulness practice: interoception, mental equanimity, and breath work
connect mindful states of awareness to contemplative and natural history writing
Mindfulness contemplation #1: Body sensing & felt sense (approx. 20 minutes)
Please listen to the guided mindfulness contemplation (link in our CMS). From the raw material of that contemplation, write a polished 600 words. Those 600 words must be typed.
Mindfulness contemplation #2: More advanced body sensing, inquiry with Snyder reading, introductory breath work (approx. 20 minutes)
Please listen to the guided mindfulness contemplation (link in our CMS). From the raw material of that contemplation, write a polished 600 words. Those 600 words must be typed.
Mindfulness contemplation #3: Sacred geometries (approx. 20 minutes)
Please listen to the guided mindfulness contemplation (link in our CMS). As the audio says at the end, draw and annotate the sacred geometry on your landscape. Shoot for at least one very dense page of drawings and annotations.
Natural History Observations | series of natural history writing essays (600 words each)
The learning goals for these assignments include the following outcomes:
identify and practice genre conventions, including experiential field observation, thick description, sensory precision, scene construction, and positioning of observer
practice the attitude of “sympathetic observer” of the natural world
Observation 1
This week’s outdoor time will be folded into your first natural history observation. While you are outdoors in a wild place for a continuous hour, focus on just one patch of ground and vegetation. Observe and describe what you see there, practicing detailed description (for example, Fleischner 3-5) and precision (think about our discussion about how to describe the sound of crickets). For the sake of this exercise, avoid adding in self-reflection or argument. Try, as Fleischner writes, to let natural history scrub clean your vision of the world (15). Convert your notes into a typed and polished piece.
Observation 2
After locating a wild landscape, describe a prominent feature of that landscape (let this be a feature different from what you wrote about in NHO #1). When describing that feature—whether it be a tree, a creek, a hill or mountain, a swarm of bees, a large patch of flowers, etc.—key in on the following descriptive elements: color, size, shape/contour, smell, texture, sound, and movement/directionality. Then, also observe and describe the "Mind" of the place, per Dogen (Snyder 21).
Observation 3
This week’s outdoor time will be folded into your natural history observation. While you are outdoors in a somehow wild place for a continuous hour, consider this quotation from Robin Wall Kimmerer: “Nanabozho did not know his parentage or origins—only that he was set down into a fully peopled world of plants and animals, winds, and water” (206, italics mine). Let your natural history observation both describe what you encounter on your landscape and how what you encounter—even when it is not a human—might have personhood.
Walking Essay | essay on place and animacy (1,200 words minimum)
Snyder, Solnit, and Macfarlane all touch on walking as part of our experience of the wild or of wilderness. For this essay, please ruminate on the question How does walking—as movement, as travel, as connection—help us better understand the natural world?
Requirements
Your research for this paper will require at least an hour of outdoor time during which you traverse a wild landscape.
Additionally, you'll need to include at least one of the readings mentioned above. Dialogue with Snyder, Solnit, or Macfarlane in a substantial way in your essay.
Rhetorically, look to Macfarlane's structure as an invention model for your own essay. Include, in your own way, the elements we discussed in his reading:
narration
exposition (explains ideas in an informational way)
reflection on ideas
reflection on interior self
argument
landscape description
sensory description
figurative language (especially metaphors and similes)
Outer Landscape Essay | essay on place and animacy (1,800 words minimum)
The learning goals for this assignment include the following outcomes:
application of reading concepts about, and stylistic approaches to, animacy
extended landscape observation
refinement of descriptive writing in concert with a thematic, reflective, or argumentative framework
attention to grammatical, syntactic, and diction choices in expressing the animacy of the landscape
Considering your own wild landscape, write about it with the animacy Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses and Aldo Leopold actually performs in his “January” piece.
To brainstorm, consider these questions:
Who is on/in your landscape?
How is that animate entity connected to the organic life force?
How could that animate entity be considered your kin?
What would have to occur in your language and writerly style to convey the animacy and kinship of your landscape? For instance, what would you need to do with verbs and pronouns? How do you describe behavior and action? From what point of view do you describe the life and activity on your landscape? (Take a look at Leopold if you need an invention model.)
Requirements
Outdoor time: your research for this paper will require at least 4 hours of outdoor time during which you observe the same wild landscape. The best approach is to return to the same landscape several times to observe the life at different points.
Genre: we are still focusing on natural history description as the primary aspect of the essay. So, the goal is not to talk about how to talk about animacy. Rather, we’re trying to actually perform animacy in our grammar and overall style. (In other words, write more like Leopold, less like Kimmerer.) While you may incorporate some personal narrative, self-reflection, argument, and exposition, 70% of your paper should be you writing about the wild landscape itself. The goal of this stricture is to make sure we pay attention to the life around us, rather than retreating into the mind or focusing on ourselves. (We’ll do that in another assignment.)
Raw material: you are welcome to use some of your natural history observation #3, but with a caution: you will need to rework that material to make the perspective and language show animacy.
Inner Landscape Essay | essay on story, self, and landscape (3,000 words minimum)
The learning goals for this assignment includes the following outcomes:
application of reading concepts about, and stylistic approaches to, storytelling, interiority, and landscape
extended landscape observation
refinement of descriptive writing in concert with a thematic, reflective, or argumentative framework
attention to grammatical, syntactic, and diction choices in expressing the connection of inner and outer landscapes
For this assignment, we’re going to synthesize many aspects of our study this semester: landscape observation and description, animacy, mindfulness, self-reflection, and, now, storytelling.
Barry Lopez’s “Story at Anaktuvuk Pass” will be our guide. Lopez writes: “The purpose of storytelling is to achieve harmony between two landscapes, to use all the elements—syntax, mood, figures of speech—in a harmonious way to reproduce the harmony of the land in the individual’s interior. Inherent in the story is the power to reorder a state of psychological confusion through contact with the pervasive truth of those relationships we call ‘the land’” (51).
The prompt for this writing assignment is simple: tell an authentic story (by Lopez’s standards) that helps harmonize your two landscapes: exterior and interior. This means you will have to engage with the land and wildlife that have shaped you. To write this story as a harmonizing force—as your own attempt at a something like a Beautyway—you will also have to set forth the relationship between the landscape outside the self and the landscape inside the self (Lopez 50).
Lopez writes of the Navaho ceremony: “Beautyway is, in part, a spiritual invocation of the order of the exterior universe, that irreducible, holy complexity that manifests itself as all things changing through time…. The purpose of this invocation is to recreate in the individual who is the subject of the Beautyway ceremony that same order, to make the individual again a reflection of the myriad enduring relationships of the landscape” (51).
There’s a good chance you have not written a personal narrative like this before, so stay close to Lopez’s essay for guidance. You will know you are off track if you write a story about your life and do not learning anything new about either the land that shaped you or the landscape of your inner life.
Brainstorming
You might begin your writing process by talking to family members who know your family’s history with the land. You might research the natural history of your area/city. If you live in the heart of the city, you might consider what the land is under all the concrete, or what big natural features are near you (like a lake or a park), or how the seasons effect the plant, animal, and human life in your area.
You might also look to land-related myths or other elevated stories that you grew up with (think Silko here). What do those stories convey about relationships between living things? And how do those multitude of relationships become a broader “landscape”?
In light of Lopez’s point that knowing a landscape is more about understanding relationships than identifying discrete parts, what relationships are the central foundations for your two landscapes?
Think through Savoy’s journey. How is she performing something like a Beautyway in our current culture?
How might Solnit’s ideas about being lost and knowing a landscape map onto the interior landscape?
Returning to Snyder’s early reading (week 4, pgs. 3-19), how is wildness present—or not present—on your exterior and interior landscapes?
What would harmonizing your two landscapes look like (literally)? What would it feel like (felt sense in the body)? How would it order or re-order your way of being, acting, and thinking?
Requirements
Outdoor time: your research for this paper will require at least 4 hours of outdoor time during which you observe a natural landscape connected to your interior inquiry for this paper. This may mean a visit to a defining landscape from your past.
Research: part of your story must be the story of the land itself. This means that you will need to research the biota of that landscape and the history of human residency on that land. (Think of Leopold’s Kentucky cane-lands example.)
Readings: additionally, you'll need to include at least 3 of our readings from the semester. Dialogue with those readings in a substantial way in your essay.
Genre: compose a narrative framework within which you describe the landscape, give exposition about the biota and the history of your landscape, and reflect on the relationship between your exterior and interior landscapes. Savoy is our model for genre.
As a review, here are the rhetorical elements we have discussed this semester:
narration
exposition (explains ideas in an informational way)
reflection on ideas
reflection on interior self
argument
landscape description
sensory description
figurative language (especially metaphors and similes)
Process activity: visualizing/outlining
One practical way of building a paper this long is to think of it in (roughly) 3 page sections. You also have 3 primary elements of the paper: story, external landscape, internal landscape. The big writing and thinking challenge for this paper is that you must decide how those elements (and those pages) are related. Are the topics and ideas progressive? Are they recursive? Are they disjointed (not yet “harmonized” in your Beautyway)? Are some parts woven together, but other parts are loose ends?
Take a look at the provided geometric designs. See which one—or ones—resonate as the potential relationship between the parts of your paper. Then, sketch out the visualization in your notebook as a way of outlining your paper. Within the contours of your visualization, fill in the themes, scenes, images, etc. you expect to include your paper.
Works Cited
Bawarshi, Anis. The Ecology of Genre. Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches, edited by Christian Weisser and Sidney Dobrin, SUNY Press, 2001, pp. 69–80.
Dayton, Paul K., and Enric Sala. Natural History: The Sense of Wonder, Creativity, and Progress in Ecology. Scientia Marina, vol. 65, suppl. 2, 2001, pp. 199–206.
Dobrin, Sidney I. and Christian R. Weisser. Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition. SUNY P, 2002.
Farber, Paul Lawrence. Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson. Johns Hopkins UP, 2000.
Fleischner, Thomas Lowe. Historia Naturalis: Inspiring Ecology. Journal of Natural History Education and Experience, vol. 14, 2019, pp. 1–2.
———. Natural History as a Practice of Kinship. Minding Nature, vol. 12, no. 3, 2019, pp. 12-15.
———. The Mindfulness of Natural History. The Way of Natural History, edited by Thomas Lowe Fleischner, Trinity UP, 2011, pp. 3–15.
Kaplan, Stephen. The Restorative Benefits of Nature: Toward an Integrative Framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 15, 1995, pp. 169–182.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Milkweed, 2013.
Kingsolver, Barbara. Introduction. A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, Oxford UP, 2020, pp. xi–xx.
Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Updated and expanded edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2008.
Miller, Carolyn R. Genre as Social Action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 70, 1984, pp. 151–167.
Mortali, Micah. Rewilding: Meditations, Practices, and Skills for Awakening in Nature. Sounds True, 2019.
MovNat: Natural Movement Fitness. https://www.movnat.com. Accessed 4 January 2023.
Narvaez, Darcia. Moral Education in a Time of Human Ecological Devastation. Journal of Moral Education, vol. 50, no. 1, 2021, pp. 55–67.
———. Revitalizing Human Virtue by Restoring Organic Morality. Journal of Moral Education, vol. 15, no. 3, 2016, pp. 223–238.
Nestor, James. Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. Riverhead Books, 2020.
Norment, Christopher. Return to Warden’s Grove: Science, Desire, and the Lives of Sparrows. U of Iowa P, 2008.
Perl, Sondra. Part One: What is Felt Sense? Felt Sense: Writing with the Body, https://compcomm.commons.gc.cuny.edu/feltsense/part-one-what-is-felt-sense. Accessed 4 January 2023.
Pieper, Josef. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Translated by Alexander Dru, Ignatius P, 2009.
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Wapner, Paul. Contemplative Environmental Studies: Pedagogy for Self and Planet. The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry vol. 3, no. 1, 2016, pp. 67–83.
———. Environmentalism and the Politics of Contemplative Inquiry. The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry, vol. 5, no. 1, 2018, pp. 159–170.
Williams, Florence. The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative. Norton, 2017.
Yagelski, Robert P. Writing as a Way of Being: Writing Instruction, Nonduality, and the Crisis of Sustainability. Hampton P, 2011.
Zajonc, Arthur. Contemplative Pedagogy: A Quiet Revolution in Higher Education. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 134, 2013, pp. 83–94.
———. Love and Knowledge: Recovering the Heart of Learning Through Contemplation. Teachers College Record, vol. 108, no. 9, 2006, pp. 1742–1759.
Contemplative Rewilding from Composition Forum 54 (Summer 2024)
Online at: http://compositionforum.com/issue/54/contemplative-rewilding.php
© Copyright 2024 Beth Connors-Manke.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.
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