Only look, and see

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to the body and soul.” – John Muir

I’ve had lovely opportunities to be outside lately – enjoying the ocean beach, walking some Iowa state park trails during an annual camping trip with friends, strolling at the Arboretum and playing today with grandson Noah and Opa Gregg at the “big park.” I’ve talked about it before (May 6, 2009 blog post), still I’d like to encourage us again to look and see the goodness of "outside" in this October 1^st Wednesday wellness email.

Consider these words --

“The cognitive benefits of nature — even if it’s just a hint of nature like a poster or a potted plant — are many and have been tallied by a number of recent studies. University of Michigan researchers Marc Berman, John Jonides and Stephen Kaplan wanted to quantify the effects of ART. [ART – Attention Restoration Theory – posits that spending time in nature, or even looking at scenes of nature, helps refocus the mind and revive the spirit.] Students were given long tests of sequences of numbers to repeat in reverse then sent on walks — half the study participants on a nature walk and half on a city walk. Upon re-testing, the nature walkers’ scores improved significantly while the city walkers’ did not. The experiment was repeated so that each student walked in nature and in the city, and everyone’s score was better after the nature walk.”

Scores showed short-term memory improving by 20% after an hour interacting with the outside. The researchers also tested the same theory by having subjects sit inside and look at pictures of either downtown scenes or nature scenes and again the results were the same: when looking at photos of nature, memory and attention scores improved by about 20%, but not when viewing the urban pictures.

There is some question around the benefits of seeing “virtual” nature. Researchers from the University of Washington’s Human Interaction With Nature and Technological Systems Lab got mixed results from two studies: One study showed plasma nature windows providing low-level restorative benefits, another study showed them no more restorative than a blank wall. So even though there i

s some ambiguity, consider using a beautiful natural scene as a screen saver: it couldn’t hurt and possibly might help.

Certainly, whenever possible, take a walk outside – for your break, over the lunch hour, in the evening, or whenever you can – especially during these gorgeous fall days.

This month may you see much beauty, may your powers of attentiveness ever increase, may you experience God's glory in

nature, and may you be always well.

Look and See

This morning, at waterside, a sparrow flew

to a water rock and landed, by error, on the back

of an eider duck; lightly it fluttered off, amused.

the duck, too, was not provoked, but, you might say, was

laughing.

This afternoon a gull sailing over

our house was casually scratching

its stomach of white feathers with one

pink foot as it flew.

Oh Lord, how shining and festive is your gift to us, if we

only look, and see.

– Mary Oliver

“God’s glory is on tour in the skies, God-craft on exhibit across the horizon. Madame Day holds classes every morning, Professor Night lectures each evening.” –King David, Psalm 19: 1-2 The Message paraphrase