"Outdoors Forgives Indoors", Majo

I was in the camp bathhouse and - even in this magnificent Northern Wisconsin retreat - I was ruminating. I just couldn't seem to shut that old mental computer off. I was running over and over a set of thoughts that really had been pretty well milked dry several minutes ago - yet I couldn't put them to rest.

Then I swung open the screen door and morning sunlight evaporated the thoughts like burning off the morning mist. I was once again part of the trees, part of the dazzling light, part of the wonderful, pure, mostly undisturbed eco-system. That turbulent, disturbed, restless mental process went suddenly silent, vacant - and my attention shifted totally outward. This felt lots better.

When I was absorbed in my own mental process, i was removed from my environment. When the richness of the natural world pulled me back out, I was integrated into my surroundings. Paul Reps, a Zen teacher, wrote a haiku (one-line poem) that goes "Outdoors forgives indoors." I find this true again and again. The natural world has a capacity to straighten out the kinks that we create in our minds - to help us establish balance again.

This principle is as true on a figurative level as the literal one. Locked up in our own personality, our own mental process, we easily become out of balance - preoccupied with our neurotic worries. But when we balance ourselves out with strong, open contact with other humans, we have the chance to heal. Any mental pre-occupation which we fully share with another is bound to change.

I like to ask myself, "What is it that I am most needing to share with another human at this point in time?" Or, "What would be the most creative way to air out my own process right now - open it up to more contact, more response, more support?"

Other people, the intelligence of other human minds, are part of our natural eco-system. When we hold our thoughts and feelings too long separate, too shut away from our species-mates, they start to turn sour and out of balance. We need periods of privacy and introversion, in the same way that I occasionally needed the seclusion of the bathhouse at camp. But I knew better than to spend all my time in there.
Outdoors forgives indoors.

(From Radical Integrity, 2007)