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  by
Michael
J. Cohen
A path to
personal, social and environmental sanity as illustrated
in traditional songs and their stories.
"When Columbus
discovered this country it was full of nuts and
berries; now most of the berries are gone."
..-Uncle
Dave Macon,
old time folk singer
"Our society is
run by insane people for insane objectives.... I
think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends
... and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane
for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
...-John
Lennon,
contemporary song artist
An
unusual description of insanity is to call it, "A
process of thinking and relating that knowingly destroys
your own life support system." In this regard, in 1978,
to promote personal, social and environmental sanity, I
was commissioned by the National Audubon Society to
collect and produce an album of folk songs for them
about people having sane relationships with nature. The
songs were introduced with paragraphs written by William
O. Douglas and narrated by Governor
Russell
Peterson, President of the National Audubon Society.
The album's object was
to reflect the love or respect of nature that American
frontiersmen and settlers developed because they lived
close to the land for long periods of time. It was
designed to consist of non-commercial, homemade songs
that were shared by common people in the folk tradition.
To my chagrin, I found very few folk songs that met this
requirement. Most of them were, instead, about the
challenges and hardships pioneers encountered while
developing the land or making a profit from it.
Musical Reverence
for Nature
In contrast to the
songs of the settlers, I discovered in Native American
cultures (the Natural People) many songs that expressed
a reverence for nature. They were sung in thankfulness
for nature's rewarding gifts for survival, as we, today,
similarly sing hymns to our God.
"I believe in God
only I spell it Nature,"
......-Frank
Lloyd Wright
 The Natural People
were sane because they connected to nature; they revered
and communed with it. In turn, they neither displayed
nor produced the personal, social and environmental
problems that we suffer, problems not found in nature
due to its balancing and restorative powers. The songs
of Natural People reflect the sanity they enjoyed from
their links with nature. For example:
The wind is
beauty, hey yah, hey yah
The hills are beauty, hey yah, hey yah
The stars are beauty, hey yah, hey yah
Hey yah, hey yah, hey yah
Beauty around me,
hey yah, hey yah
Beauty surrounds me hey yah, hey yah
Beauty abounds (in) me hey yah, hey yah
Hey yah, hey yah, hey yah
In contrast to the
sentiments in this song, our society is excessively
separated and suffers from our conquest of nature within
and around us. For example, on occasion people have told
me to put my "John Henry" on an official document. Mind
you, not my "John Han*censored*," the noted signer of the
Declaration of Independence, but my John Henry. When
I've asked who John Henry was, those in charge seldom
know. They say, "It's just an expression."
Conquering Natural
Systems
John Henry is a folk
hero, an legendary hammer man who drove steel in the
1880's to build a tunnel through a mountainous natural
area. The engineering company introduced a steam drill
that would replace him if it could do his job faster. To
secure his job and self-esteem, John Henry swore that he
could drive steel better than the drill.
John Henry said to
his Captain, I am a natural man,
A man ain't nothing but a man,
And before I let a steam drill beat me down,
I'll die with the hammer in my hand.
A race between John
Henry and the steam drill was arranged and John Henry
won. In the allotted time, "He drove his hole sixteen
feet, the steam drill made only nine." However, his
great effort was also his downfall:
The hammer that
John Henry swung,
It weighed over nine pounds.
His hammer was a striking fire
He broke a rib on his left-hand side
His entrails fell to the ground
He drove so hard that he broke his poor heart
And he lay down his hammer and he died, poor boy
He lay down his hammer and he died.
Identifying Our
Troubles
Many folk songs and
legends describe John Henry's heartfelt plight because
we subconsciously recognize it being similar to our own
stressful troubles as members of industrial society.
Like the Natural People, we are born as wise and
balanced parts of nature. However, we become what our
nature-disconnected environment molds our thinking to
make us.
"We are not
ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the
mind to suffer with the body."
......-William
Shakespeare
Although we are part
of nature, our indoor existence separates our thinking
from nature's balanced and restorative ways. On average,
over 95 percent of our time and 99 percent of our
thinking is disconnected from nature. We are
economically and socially rewarded for thinking out of
tune with natural systems and for being successful
exploiters of them. These rewards condition or addict
our contemporary thinking to operate in
nature-conquering ways, including its conquest of our
natural self. We must recognize the madness of this
addiction for our thinking is our destiny.
"The way it is
now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we
tried to shut up the insane we would run out of
building materials."
......-Mark
Twain
Restoring Sanity.
In 1966, to help reduce our personal and environmental
insanity, I introduced a unique nature-connected
psychology to a school program. Folk songs played a big
part in it. The object was to help teachers and students
learn how to genuinely re-connect their mind with
authentic nature's
balanced ways and enjoy the sanity that resulted.
Genuine sensory
contact with the beauty and restorative powers of nature
helped the
school community and its members increase their good
sense and happiness. In time, like the Natural People,
they neither suffered, displayed nor promoted the
destructive problems we normally face. Trained observers
documented that the experiment produced "A utopian
living and learning community that was on the side of
the angels."
"Our great
problems are the result of the difference between
how we think and how nature works."
......-Gregory
Bateson
Today, through the
Internet, my nature-reconnecting psychology tool helps
us benefit from nature's ways by empowering us, at will,
to make conscious sensory contact with natural areas,
backyard or backcountry. While in nature, the tool helps
us disconnect our mind's addictive bonds to our indoor
ways of knowing and relating. Otherwise, our addiction
causes us to remain mentally separated from nature and
our thinking remains filled with stressful problems,
expectations and stories from our indoor lives, even
while we are surrounded by the beauty and peace of a
forest. We, however, call this normal, not a mental
disorder.
"That, of course,
is the devil's bargain of addiction: a short-term
good feeling in exchange for the steady meltdown of
one's life."
......-Daniel
Goldman
Increasing
Self-Esteem
By applying my
nature-connecting
tool
in natural settings, our thinking becomes sensuously
conscious of nature and registers nature's natural
systems, senses and sensitivities. The tool enables us
to help our thinking become more sane from conscious
contact with the qualities of nature that produce its
well being, and our well being, too. This occurs during
times when our thinking becomes whole with nature. In
gratitude for this gift from nature, our psyche loves
nature and that increases our ability to feel and
validate this love. It becomes important, not "flakey."
This is environmentally significant because we
passionately protect what we love and accordingly
increase our self-esteem.
Sigmund Freud noted,
"A man who is in love declares that I and You are one
and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact." When
our thinking celebrates our inherent love for natural
systems within and around us, we think in balance, like
nature works, and restore our sanity.
Fortunately, I
discovered that some environmentally caring contemporary
people had written songs about how they were connected
to nature and I finally used them to produce that
National Audubon Society album
"Equilibrium:
Songs of Nature and Humanity"
in 1979.
Further information:
Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D. is
the
Director of the
Institute of Global Education, Project NatureConnect. He is the author of ten published books and several albums dedicated to folk music
as well as coming from a folk singing family (including his brother, John Cohen,
of the New Lost City Ramblers).
[This article is reproduced with permission from Michael J. Cohen
and can also be found at this Web site:
http://www.sugaronthefloor.com/folksanity.html. Photo: Uncle Dave Macon].
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