How Nature is an Antidote to Depression
“The song of the thrush and the bloom of the magnolia and the lush optimism of that first blade of grass through the frosty soil — these bewilderments of beauty do not dissipate the depression, but they do dissipate the self-involvement with which we humans live through our sorrows, and in so unselfing us, they give us back to ourselves.”–Maria Popova in Brain Pickings newsletter@brainpickings.com June 21, 2020.
Mary Anne Seibert
Maria Popova recently posted in her daily online journal, Brain Pickings, an essay about five beloved writers who wrote about nature as an antidote to depression. Walt Whitman, John Keats, Lorraine Hansberry, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson all describe what each of us also knows about the healing properties of nature.
Walt Whitman in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” speaks to depression as the “dark patches” that fall. After his stroke that left Whitman severely paralyzed, he goes to live with his brother in the woods of New Jersey. After two years, Whitman has almost a complete recovery, which he credits in Specimen Days to his outdoor gym in the forest. In another entry, Whitman writes, “I don’t know what or how, but it seems to me mostly owing to these skies, (every now and then I think, while I have of course seen them every day of my life, I never really saw the skies before,) I have had this autumn some wondrously contented hours — may I not say perfectly happy ones?”
Keats’ brief life is marked with periods of depression where he cannot write. He has two antidotes: being with friends and being in nature. In Selected Letters he writes, “I could not live without the love of my friends and a love of nature.” In a letter to a friend he writes, “The setting sun will always set me to rights–or if a Sparrow comes before my Window I take part in its existence.”
Lorraine Hansberry, the first black playwright on Broadway, suffers tremendously from depression but also finds healing in nature.
In a diary entry in Imani Perry’s biography, Looking for Lorraine, she writes, “Hills, the trees, sunrise and sunset–the lake the moon and the stars/summer clouds–the poets have been right in these centuries..Even in its astounding imperfection this earth of ours is magnificent.”
Henry David Thoreau, who was diagnosed with a seasonal affective disorder, writes in The Journal of Nery David Thoreau, “If you are afflicted with melancholy at this season, go to the swamp and see the brave spears of skunk-cabbage buds already advanced toward a new year…There is no can’t nor cant to them. They see over the brow of winter’s hill. They see another summer ahead.”
The marine biologist, Rachel Carson, writes her landmark book about the effect of pesticides on our environment, Silent Spring, as she is dying a painful death from cancer. She writes to her friend, Dorothy Freeman, after a difficult walk to their favorite spot at the tip of Southport Island, Maine, “Most of all I will remember the Monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force…For the Monarch, that cycle is measured in a known span of months. For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know. But the thought is the same: when that intangible cycle has run its course, it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to an end.
That is what those brightly fluttering bits of life taught me this morning. I found a deep happiness in it — so I hope, may you…..
I want to live on in your memories of happiness. I shall write more of those things. But tonight, I’m weary and must put out the light. Meanwhile, there is this word — and my love will always live.”–Maria Popova in Figuring (Pantheon 2019)
–Maria Popova in Brain Pickings newsletter@brainpickings.com June 21, 2020.
Joanna. joannaseibert.com