Savouring

This beautiful scene is in Tasmania’s Mt Field National Park, a great place to experience the beauty buzz.

Not far from these falls, there is a magnificent forest of towering Swamp Gums (Eucalyptus regnans) where I came across this sign.

The sign impressed me, not only because of its appropriateness for the setting (congratulations to the people responsible) but also because of its broader message about how to respond to natural beauty – we should “savour” it.

Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff have written a book about savouring, which they define as being deliberately mindful of pleasure and attentive to its source. They describe a range of techniques for savouring. Three are particularly relevant to enjoying the beauty buzz in full measure:

• Be absorbed: Go with the “flow”. Stay with your feelings and try not to think about what is happening and why. Dwell in the moment and be aware of your oneness with the object of your contemplation. Ignore the presence of others and shut out distracting thoughts. Don’t rush for the camera – give priority to making a “psychological” record rather than a photographic or electronic one.

• Sharpen perceptions: Accept aesthetic pleasure’s implicit invitation to discover more. Let your attention take you deeper into the experience. Observe mindfully – listen, taste, feel, smell as well as look. Follow Rachel Carson’s suggestion to focus as if this is the last time you will have the experience.

• Build memories: After allowing time for absorption, take a photo, make a sketch, write a diary or journal entry. Reminisce about your experience with a friend. If appropriate keep a physical souvenir (a pebble, feather or leaf, for example).       

As the sign gently hints, we need to surrender ourselves a little more to the tempo of the forest and make time in our busy lives for contemplation and savouring.

The beauty buzz and happiness

The beauty buzz is usually more than a transient feeling of pleasure. It can be what psychologist and happiness guru, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “cheeks-sent-me-high”) calls enjoyment – to distinguish it from sensory or “surface” pleasures of the kind we have drinking a good espresso coffee, for example, or having a shoulder massage.

Enjoyment or “deep” pleasure leaves us with a sense of fulfilment or of having experienced something that is mentally, emotionally and perhaps spiritually enriching.

Enjoyment comes from being willingly and completely absorbed in an activity that we value. Csikszentmihalyi refers to this unusual investment of attention and loss of self-awareness as an optimal experience or a state of “flow”. To be caught up in this state, he says, is to experience happiness. “High moments” and even many less intense forms of the beauty buzz are experienced as states of flow.

Encountering natural beauty can leave us feeling that something of quality and worth has entered our lives – that we have been involved with something “wholesome” and fulfilling. This is fulfilment not of the kind that is linked with success or accomplishment but of a different type altogether. This is fulfilment that comes from being in the presence of greatness or excellence. Fulfilment of this kind makes us feel better about ourselves. “After an enjoyable event”, says Csikszentmihalyi, “we know that we have changed, that our self has grown: in some respect, we become more complex as a result of it”.

Csikszentmihalyi links enjoyment and happiness directly with aesthetic pleasure (the beauty buzz). A wonderful view can provide an experience of “extreme joy, a moment of ecstasy”, he says. All of our senses can tap into the beauty of nature but Csikszentmihalyi singles out “seeing” for particular mention, making the point that we are prone to overlook the potential of vision to provide optimal experiences (or high moments). We need to cultivate the skills of visual contemplation because these “provide constant access to enjoyable experiences”.

Here are my long-time bushwalking friends, Ron and Warwick, contemplating some “spekky views” (Warwick’s words). I suspect that were having moments of deep enjoyment (happiness) as well.

The beauty buzz and inspiration

Anyone remotely aware of Australia’s conservation movement over the past 40 years will know the name Milo Dunphy. Milo was very much the son of his father, Myles. On Christmas Eve, 1910, the 19 year old Myles stood at the now famous Echo Point Lookout in Katoomba. 

The view of vast, blue-green valleys and towering sandstone cliffs glowing orange in the afternoon light filled him with such awe that later he wrote, “I had never seen such a scene before. It is hard to grasp the stupendous immensity connected with all things relating to the scenic part of the Mountains”. Myles’ experience that day fired a passion and sparked a mission.

The passion was for bushwalking and the mission was the preservation of bushland for the pleasure and well-being of everyone. By the end of his life, Myles had become a legend among bushwalkers and a towering figure in the Australian conservation movement.

This is a great example of the way aesthetic pleasure (the beauty buzz) can inspire. Myles’ aesthetic “high moment” sparked a life-changing interest and commitment. The botanist, Sir Joseph Banks is another person whose life’s direction was profoundly influenced by natural beauty. He attributed his passion for the study of plants to the beauty of the wildflowers he encountered when he was a boy.

There are countless other examples from science, the arts, music and literature that testify to the power of natural beauty to motivate human endeavour. Names like Turner, Constable, McCubbin, Ansel Adams, Peter Dombrovskis, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley readily come to mind. It is fair to say, I think, that the beauty buzz has been one of the foundation stones of human civilisation and culture.

My artist daughter, Wendy, certainly finds inspiration in natural beauty, especially the explosion of beauty that follows the monsoon in south-eastern Nepal where she spends a good deal of her time. The name she has chosen for her enterprise is After the Monsoon which says it all really.

She was inspired by the monsoonal blooms on this Poinciana tree

 

To create this using polymer clay

If you have a story about an experience of natural beauty that has been significant for and you, I would be delighted to hear it.

Another example of mathematics in nature

I have been distracted again. Sorry. I will keep my promise to write about the ripple effect of the beauty buzz, but first I have a discovery to share with you. Actually, I did not make the discovery myself but one of my bushwalking friends, Cecilia Goon, deserves the credit.

And this is it -

- not the Pouched Coral-fern (Gleichenia dicarpa) itself,  but the hexagon formed by its branching fronds. As I said in my last post, the hexagon is one of Nature’s most structurally efficient and aesthetically pleasing shapes.

For the Pouched Coral-fern to produce this shape, each pair of new fronds has to form an angle of 120 degrees. As you can see, the plants manage this with amazing, if not quite perfect, precision.

I have not found an explanation for why coral ferns grow this way but I noticed that when you look down on the leaves, you can see that each hexagonal array provides partial shelter for the layers below. The result is a protective canopy – a bit like a rainforest canopy, but with an important difference. The vertical spaces between the layers allow air and moisture to circulate.

The Pouched Coral-fern grows in sheltered, well-watered areas. The specimens I was looking at were growing where there was a lot of seeping water. I suspect that the plant has evolved to form a natural umbrella (it is sometimes called the Umbrella Fern) in order to preserve moisture around its roots. As the plants can grow to 4 metres in height, a dense patch of them forms a kind of forest with its own humid microclimate. By preserving soil moisture in this way, the clever fern maintains favourable growing conditions during dry times.

Ringtail possums love to use coral-fern to make their drays or nests in the forks of trees. They somehow know that the hexagonally arrayed leaves bind together to make a particularly strong and dense structure. Even these cute little marsupials have discovered a way of incorporating hexagons into architecture just as bees (in their honeycomb) and humans have.

The beauty buzz in a lazy universe

I have had a change of plan. Instead of talking about the ripple effects of the beauty buzz in this post, I want to share some further thoughts about the beauty buzz itself.

I have been watching an SBS TV documentary series called “The Code”. According to the presenter, mathematics professor, Marcus du Sautoy, everything in the Universe can be described mathematically. “He would say that”, I hear some cynics say, but he has convinced me that there is a mathematical code – read equations, ratios, numbers and geometry – underpinning all there is in the universe. This applies to the seemingly chaotic complexity of trees, forests, mountain ranges, clouds and coastlines as much as it does to nature’s more orderly structures such as planets, crystals, water droplets and snowflakes.

From time to time in his presentation, du Sautoy drops in references to aesthetics and beauty. He did this, for example, when talking about the Golden Ratio, the relationship (1: 1.618). This ratio, which is commonly associated with the curved elegance of a Nautilus shell and Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”, crops up many times in art and architecture as well as in nature.

Beauty figured again in his exploration of shapes in nature. One of the most remarkable (and potentially aesthetically pleasing) of these shapes is the hexagon – the choice of bees for the cells in honeycomb. The hexagon, or more correctly hexagonal prism, occurs commonly in lava beds such as the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland and the Organ Pipes near Mt Kaputar in northern NSW.

As the close-up shot of the “pipes” shows most of the columns are hexagonal in cross-section.

The columns took on this shape as the lava cooled, contracted and became stressed. The resulting hexagonal pattern of cracking represents the best way of containing these stresses with the minimum of energy. The Universe is lazy says du Sautay and will always save on energy and materials.

Back to the beauty buzz:  du Sautay has helped me to understand more clearly that before the human brain can experience beauty it must first detect the forms, patterns and relationship that give the universe order and meaning. It must be sensitive to symmetry, balance and proportion (e.g., Golden Ratio), for example, and to “good form” as exemplified in the hexagon, the cube, the triangular pyramid and the other three perfectly symmetrical Platonic solids.

I believe that the human brain is hard-wired to make sense of the universe’s handiwork – to discern the forms and patterns of nature spontaneously and intuitively. The fact that we humans are able, without effort, to make sense of what would otherwise be mind-blowing complexity is nothing short of wondrous.

In a particularly fascinating segment, du Sautay takes us behind the art of Jackson Pollack to reveal the depth of that man’s genius.

This is just part of a Pollack canvas but this section is remarkably similar to the canvas a whole. In this and similar works, Jackson captured the essence of the most commonly occurring structure in nature. This structure, technically called a fractal, looks rough and fragmented but it has a defining property that brings order to chaos. A part view of the structure, large or small, is very similar to the view of the whole. For example, the leafy silhouette of a tree is similar whether you are 100, 50 or 10 metres away.

Pollack’s genius lay in creating fractal designs. He probably never heard of fractals but he understood them intuitively. People find beauty in his work in the same way that they find beauty in the rough raggedness of nature. Our brains have been programmed by evolution to do so. What sets Pollack apart is his gift to produce as well as appreciate fractals. He did this without the aid of mathematics and computer generated imaging, just with his brush and his movements around a canvas spread over the floor.

The Beauty Buzz

It’s party time for Rainbow Lorikeets around my place. The wet summer has kept the callistemons (Red Bottlebrushes) flowering and providing an abundance of nectar. I was able to get this photo in minutes simply by walking into the front garden and pointing the camera at the source of excited screeching and whistling.

As you can see, the birds and the flowers make a colourful and interesting display. But from the Lorikeets’ point of view, the aesthetics of the colours don’t matter. It is what the colour is communicating (Here’s food) that interests them.

In nature, the function of colour is communication. Colour is the basic language of Nature – a language not of symbols, as with spoken and written languages, but of signals. (Although, as traffic lights testify, we humans have learned to use colours symbolically as well).

When we look at a scene like the one in the photograph, it is easy to think that colour is “in” nature. But that is not the case; colour is something that you, Lorikeets and I experience because our brains can read and interpret signals in the form of light waves emanating from the world around us. Colour is in the brain of the beholder.

And the same is true of beauty. Lorikeets, a sunset, a garden of flowers and all other of nature’s glories are beautiful only because there are brains that “see” them that way.

Actually beauty is more a matter of brain chemistry than it is of anything else. Sure, we can intellectualise about beauty all we like, but the basis of beauty is an outpouring of chemicals, mainly the natural opioids (endorphins) and dopamine, in our brain.  These are the “feel good” chemicals that excite the emotions of pleasure and reward.

Beauty gives us an emotional “hit”, which is why I speak of the “beauty buzz”. The buzz can range from a “tingle” to a full-on high.

I can still remember, even after 40 years, the high I experienced when I first gazed on this scene. It was at the end of a long, hard day of trekking in central Nepal, I was walking a little ahead of my companions, weary and looking forward to reaching the campsite. I arrived at a small saddle and there it was – this view. I remember exclaiming to myself, “It can’t be true!”. Time stopped for me as I was totally caught up in the scene. I have no idea how long I remained there, utterly transfixed (I still get goose bumps recalling it). When I finally made my way to the camp, I had completely forgotten my fatigue and my mood had changed. Somehow the world seemed a better place.

This was an experience of the beauty buzz “writ large”. It is usually much less spectacular, but, even in its milder forms, the beauty buzz has the same emotional content – pleasure, reward and stimulation.

We are all born with the ability to experience the beauty buzz or aesthetic pleasure. We do not learn how to be aware of beauty. It is “knowledge” that is encoded in our genes and so comes naturally to us. We may acquire different tastes in beauty as we grow up and have different life experiences, but our shared basic sensitivity to beauty is innate. It is perhaps the most conspicuous feature of biophilia, the most convincing expression of our innate yearning for contact with the natural world.

But the buzz itself is only part of the story. What it can do for us I’ll talk about in my next posting.

The precious legacy

I like this photo of my friend, Paul, having a particularly intimate biophilic moment (I assure you no yabbies were harmed in the taking of this photo).

Speaking of biophilic moments reminds me of a wonderful character called Kenny Salwey who was featured in a TV documentary some years ago. Kenny was the last of the Mississippi River Rats – individualists who lived on the shores of the river, subsisting mainly by fishing and hunting.

Kenny understood the special bond we have with nature. At one point in the documentary, he made a remark along these lines, “There is something in all of us that makes us look up when we hear the call of Canada Geese flying overhead?  What a precious legacy that is!”

I would be surprised if Kenny had heard of ‘biophilia’, but that is what he was talking about. And he was absolutely right in calling it a “precious legacy”.

Biophilia is precious because of the enormous value we can get from it. To follow the promptings of biophilia is to avail ourselves of a priceless array of benefits, which I think of as the gifts of the precious legacy. These gifts can be packaged and labelled in all sorts of ways but I talk about them as:

The beauty buzz (aesthetic pleasure)

Photo from the YBC collection

Relaxation

           

Restoration

           

Tranquillity

Photo from the YBC collection

Connections (with self, others and the cosmos)

Health

Photo from the YBC collection

An authentic childhood

 

You may be puzzled why fun, pleasure and perhaps other obvious benefits of being in nature are not mentioned. Be assured, they will be. Just stay with me as I ‘unpack’ the gifts in the postings to come.

(YBC =  Yarrawood Bushwalking Club)