Solvitur Ambulando

Solvitur ambulando is a Latin phrase meaning “it is solved by walking.” According to legend it was first uttered by the Greek philosopher Diogenes. After listening patiently to another philosopher’s ridiculous “proof” that motion was impossible, Diogenes simply got up and walked away, muttering “solvitur ambulando.” If ancient Greeks had mics, that’d be a mic drop.

            Since then, solvitur ambulando has taken on a much wider meaning. Countless poets, essayists, and philosophers have cited the aphorism as proof of the benefit of a robust walk. But its usefulness extends even beyond that.

            Human beings evolved on their feet. For hundreds of thousands of years we walked everywhere, all day, every day. Our bodies were designed to move. And yet in this mechanized age we sit for hours at a time, often all day, walking only to get another cup of coffee, or pee the last one out. And it’s killing us – obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and a host of other problems shorten our lives. After centuries of increasing life-expectancy, we are the first generation in a long, long time to die sooner than our ancestors. As health experts put it, sitting is the new smoking.

            Beyond physical wellness, walking significantly improves our mental health. Depression, anxiety, and other maladies of the mind shrink beneath the grandeur of a wide open sky. There’s something about leaving the confines of your four walls and stepping out onto the path through your village. Whether on a nature trail, a suburban lane, or a downtown street, walking reintroduces you to the community of things – the world that gave birth to you and everything you know, everything you see, everything you feel, and everything you are. Coming out of isolation and sauntering far afield brings you home to yourself.

            Walking through my neighborhood the other day I bumped into a neighbor I hadn’t seen in three years. We had a lot of catching up to do. Thirty minutes later I felt as though I’d read an entire novel rich with pathos, grief, recognition, and laughter – and I’ll wager she felt the same. We need each other. We build each other. We are each other. I felt deeply my own sorrows and joys in hers. The rain-wet sidewalk, the bare winter trees, and the leaden sky felt warm and safe. I was at home in my own skin, and in this beautiful, painful, hopeful world. By coming to know strangers, we are no longer strangers to ourselves.

            And so we come to the deeper meaning of solvitur ambulando – that there is wordless healing in ambulation, that is, movement. We overestimate our intellectual capacity to solve all of our problems at the level of thought. Rational discourse, refined conceptual thinking, and intellectual discernment yield many fruits. But they have limits. When it comes to the really big problems – the meaning of life, death, love, and everything in between – we can’t think our way out of a wet paper bag. When words and thoughts fail us, take to your feet. Move. Feel the problem shift, soften, open, and dissolve all on its own. I don’t know why it works. It just does.

            In an even broader sense, solvitur ambulando conveys the power of embodiment – that wisdom isn’t something you know, it’s something you are. Truth-claims made by others, no matter how compelling, shimmer and fade like ghosts until you test them in the laboratory of your own life. Only through action does the truth take form.           

You don’t understand cooking until you cook. You don’t taste the challenges and joys of marriage until you walk down the aisle. You can’t criticize the creative product of another until you’ve dared to risk offering your own creation on the same stage. Only when we walk the walk do we earn the right to talk.

            Even our moral positions benefit from the deep-tissue empathy of embodiment. Until you have faced an unwanted pregnancy yourself, your position on the legality or morality of abortion falls short, no matter how learned or principled. Good people disagree on the rectitude of terminating pregnancies. But until you live it, your words carry the taint of sanctimony and grandstanding.

            Out beyond the platitudes of the sermon or the pronouncements of the lecture hall there is a messy world of complicated interconnections, wordless realizations, and untraceable sensibilities. We ought to learn how to do better at leaving each other alone to the authority of our own embodied knowing. Life is hard. We make it harder by interfering with the natural pathway wisdom often travels – the inner road of our soul-wanderings.

            As each of us walks through this world, we see what we see, feel what we feel, and come to know what we come to know – by walking. In the alchemy of time, substantive wisdom arises like steam from the cauldron of our suffering. Life is going to hurt. There is no short cut. You have to walk right through the fire.

            Get a dog. The rescue shelters are full of them. Bring one home. Walk her every day, rain or shine, whether you feel like it or not. Let a dog reconnect you to your neighborhood, your neighbors, the natural world, and your own latent joy. There are clouds to trace, fields to cross, and trees to interlace with your meandering. There are shores along the lake or sea that never show themselves the same way twice.   

            In high school I sometimes struggled to pay attention to my teachers. My mind often wandered. (How ironic that I would one day become a teacher myself, my work as a lecturer deeply informed by the lived experience of how boring school can be). One night, while trying to do my homework, I chanced upon a poem by Walt Whitman called “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” I felt as though I’d been hit by lightning.

            When I heard the learn’d astronomer

            When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

            When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

            When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

            How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

            Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

            In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

            Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

            I closed my book, turned off the light, and went for a walk through the silent darkness of my sleepy suburban neighborhood. I never did finish that homework assignment. Whatever problem I was working on remains unsolved, by me anyway. But I have a feeling it solved itself.

            Ultimately, you cannot receive truth second hand. What another proclaims, I must experience myself. So it is that the best advice often falls on deaf ears. Until you have the ears to hear, the most beautiful words are nothing more than clanging cymbals.

Forest Bathing

In the new age of multitasking it’s radical to monotask. Stripping away all distractions and focusing on a single thing seems quaint, dated, or even seditious. We pay a lot of lip service to mindfulness and being in the now, but we rarely do it.

            In Japan a new practice is taking shape called shinrin-yoku or forest bathing – a slow, meandering walk in nature without plan or purpose. A growing body of evidence shows that contemplative immersion in any natural environment produces significant shifts in body chemistry and consciousness. In a series of controlled experiments, people who practiced shinrin-yoku for as little as fifteen minutes experienced lower concentrations of cortisol, a lower pulse rate, lower blood pressure, greater parasympathetic nerve activity, and lower sympathetic nerve activity than their counterparts in city environments. In plain English, they felt better – a lot better.

            The term shinrin-yoku was first coined by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries in 1982. Initially researchers supposed that the benefits of shinrin-yoku came from ingesting (through the breath) volatile substances called phytoncides, the essential oils of wood such as a-Pinene and limonene. But determining causation for the measurable, beneficial effects of shinrin-yoku is not as easy as experiencing them – just get outside. Besides, not all of us have easy access to woodland forests. Some of us live in the desert, or by the sea. Trees aren’t essential for shinrin-yoku. Any kind of natural setting will do.

            There’s no doubt that human life has changed dramatically in the last century. For hundreds of thousands of years we lived mostly outside without the benefit of electric light. Up until quite recently, the vast majority of us were engaged in hunting or agriculture of one kind or another – working long hours under an open sky in close contact with nature and the cycles of the seasons. When electric light, central heating, and air conditioning brought us all inside our lives changed forever. We lost touch with the natural world. We no longer know the names of the stars, let alone the plants and animals. Then came screens: first television, then computers, and now all manner of hand-held devices. For all the benefits of these wonderful machines, there’s a cost – physically, mentally, and spiritually.

            So how do you do shinrin-yoku? The first thing to realize is that this is not hiking. Hiking is goal oriented. You set a destination, choose a path, and measure success by distance traveled. Some hikers even talk about “bagging peaks” as if they were possessions to be carried home and stored on a trophy shelf. Shinrin-yoku, on the other hand, has nothing to do with conquest and acquisition.

            Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when you head out to shinirin-yoku.

1.      Leave your phone/camera in the car.

2.      Move slowly, stop often, watch, listen, and breathe.

3.      Go alone.

4.      If you go with others, make an agreement to refrain from talking until it’s over.

5.      Include some sitting. Feel your way to a special spot, sit down, and just be.

Why no cameras or phones? Because the whole point of shinrin-yoku is to shift consciousness from one modality to another. We all love our screens, and every time we look at one there’s a release of endorphins. That’s why it feels good. In shinrin-yoku we set aside this habit for a little while. Also, as much as I love photography, it distracts from the focus of shinrin-yoku. We don’t want to spend our time thinking about how best to record this wonderful experience. Making art is important, but let’s leave that for another time. For now, just be in the experience. In shinrin-yoku, the less you do, the more you’ll be.

When we move slowly, mindfully, and without a destination in mind, we come out of our busy-mind and into the present moment. The wind comes alive – we hear it in the trees, we feel it on our skin, we see it in the waving meadow grasses. And through its scent we come to know something of the wider world – the loamy earth, the salt of the sea, the rain on distant mountains, and the warmth of coming spring. These are the things we usually miss, and they’re right under our nose.

Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh teaches walking meditation – slow and mindful walking, matching the steps with the breath, not talking, not thinking, just feeling the loving support of the earth with your bare feet. When we walk mindfully we give ourselves the opportunity to get back in touch with our body. We are not walking for outer purpose – to get to the store, to get to the office, to get back to the car – we are walking just to walk. We are free. We simply enjoy the wash of gratitude and beauty that comes over us as we awaken to the unbroken intimacy we share with our Earth Mother. We feel a deep sense of wellness and belonging rise up from our core. We know we are home in the world. We are no longer strangers here. The boundaries dissolve.

In his 1836 book Nature Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about such a moment:

“Crossing a bare common in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, – no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master of servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.”

Even before we first crawled down from the trees in the African savannah a million years ago and began walking upright, we have always been at home in the wild world. Why would now be any different? We are made of the stuff of the world. The earth is our mother, our brother, our sister, and our father. We have walked a long way. But we are always home.

The Wisdom of Trees

Summer time is a good time to go outside. There’s nothing like a walk in the woods to clear away the debris of worry and woe. Sometimes the best teachers are the ones who say the least, and in the silence of their presence we feel innate wisdom welling up through the cracks of our own lives. The best teachers might be trees.

Feeling stuck? Feeling sad? Feeling nothing at all? Find a winding path through a canopy of trees, leave your worried mind behind and let the voices of the wind lead you deep into this present moment. As your awareness begins to shift, you will notice, gradually at first and then suddenly, that trees are silent teachers and the lessons they offer would change our lives if we had the patience and courage to learn them.

Here is what trees know.

Grow where you’re planted. We do not choose our parents, our families, our birthplace, our century, our genes or any of the other accidents that inexorably shape our lives. Like trees, we must learn to accept the things we cannot change and thrive where we are. As a tree grows from a tiny seed and rises up through the challenges of its environment, adapting adversities into advantages, wisdom begins with acceptance and self-knowledge and ends with ascension and transcendence.

The invisible is the source of visible. Unseen beneath the surface, roots grow deep giving trees the stability to stand tall and reach for the light. Trees instinctively know this, and put far more energy into root growth than branch and trunk growth in the early stages of their lives. Only when the roots are firmly established do the upper branches and leaves unfurl. We too should attend first to our inner growth before we get top-heavy with adornments and accessories.

Young and old have different needs and different gifts. A tiny sapling is weak and tender and needs protection from hungry mouths and trampling feet. The same tree, many years later, is able to provide protection, shelter and sustenance for others. Our roles change as well as we age and grow. But no matter what our stage of development, strength comes out of our own nature, not our busy efforts. Stand in the truth of who you are at this moment in time. Accept help when you need it, but don’t stay helpless and dependent forever. Allow yourself to grow so big that others take refuge in you.

Strength comes from struggle. Twenty years ago when scientists built Biosphere 2, a vast, enclosed ecosystem in the mountains of Arizona, they planted, among other things, trees. The trees inside the sealed enclosure grew more rapidly than their wild cousins outside. But they were thin and weak with underdeveloped root systems. Some even fell over from their own weight. At first scientists were mystified. Why would trees not thrive in this “perfect” environment? Then they realized that the trees were weakened by the absence of the one thing not included in Biosphere 2: wind. In the wild, trees must withstand strong wind and as a result develop what botanists call stress wood – strong, fibrous wood that vastly improves the quality of life for a tree. In our own lives, it is hardship and struggle that spurs our growth and strengthens our core. As we work hard to overcome the difficult people and challenging situations that threaten our serenity and steal our comfort, a toughness develops within us that informs everything we do. In light of this truth, gratitude, not resentment, is the wisest response to the forces that oppose us.

Nature is more cooperative than competitive. Survival of the fittest is true up to a point. Life begins with self interest. Inevitably, however, organisms, both within and between species, realize that their own survival is deeply intertwined with the survival of others. We’re much stronger together than we are apart. The well being of others becomes our own well being. The lie of individuality is laid bare by the truth of interconnectedness. Just as the cells of your own body work together to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts, we too are cells in a wider ecosystem utterly void of boundaries. Life is one vast phenomenon – conscious, aware, perceptive, intelligent, creative, adaptive – systems nested within systems without beginning or end. As individuals, if you can even call us that, we are simply one momentary expression of the vast field of consciousness that expresses itself as stars and dandelions and blue whales. To not know this is to remain deeply ignorant of your essential nature.

Nothing is wasted, everything has value. In nature, there is no such thing as trash. Last year’s leaves become next year’s soil. Every individual form arises out of material left behind by previous organisms. There is no new matter. At the molecular level, matter simply reforms and recombines into new aggregates and arrangements. Nothing is ever lost. In the forest, there is a thin, diaphanous veil between birth and dying. Consciousness moves through the veil like the in and out breath of a sleeping god. In our own brief lives we too are formed from the materials of those who went before us, just as the things we cast off are re-embodied. Nothing is ever thrown away. There is no such place as “away”.

Be only who you are. Cedars don’t come from apple seeds. Have the courage and humility to surrender to your own nature. Don’t waste time trying to be something you are not. Without pretense or guile trees effortlessly express their own nature. They make it look easy. But it is not. For us, a thousand threads of desire, envy and illusion tug at our hearts and pull us away from the simplicity of our essential core. It takes discipline and humility to learn how to distinguish between the authentic energy of our own nature expanding and the inauthentic egoic cravings and desires rooted in fear, anxiety and ill-founded feelings of inadequacy. Do you want to become a singer because singing is your authentic calling or do you want to become a singer to salve a wound caused by feelings of inadequacy? If the latter is true, no amount of fame and glory will ever heal that wound. If the former is true, the music itself will fill you with satisfaction. In other words, is singing rooted in your authentic nature, and end in itself, or is singing a means to an end, namely self-aggrandizement? Before you embark on any strenuous journey, be it a career in the arts, a marriage or any other attempt to craft a life of joy and meaning, deep soul-searching is needed to sort this out. Spend some time under a big, shady tree. Life isn’t long enough for a thousand wrong turns.

Don’t be afraid to grow. Trees never apologize for growing new leaves and branches. They don’t intentionally stay small in a misguided effort to appear humble. You don’t do anyone any favors by shrinking, holding back or hiding your gifts. Let what is trying to emerge through you emerge. Become a channel through which the creative energy of the universe can sing one more song. But go slow. A tree never hurries, and every movement is in keeping with its current strengths and abilities. There is no need to struggle and strain. Natural effortlessness is far more effective than hurried grasping.

Chances are there are woods not far from your home. The forest is lush, green and full of secrets. Take a day and walk alone through shafts of light and fragrant breezes. There is so much to learn from the wisdom of trees.