Hello, I'm Rosie, in the ordinary world, I'm a leadership coach and I also think of myself as an eco-psychologist, which means that I took my classical scientific psychology training and got interested in the relationship between humans and nature and studied that a lot as well. I lead retreats, I coach people, I help groups of people reshape the things they're trying to do more creatively, and have ideas based on the principles of living systems, how nature works, and how nature solves pretty much every problem that we could cook up in its own life giving ways.

 And I think that's a pretty good inspiration for all of us in all that we do. I think the work of reconnecting to nature is so so important for so many reasons. At an individual level, it's so good for our mental health and our wellbeing to get out there. But I'm actually more interested in it at a collective level. And I think that the things that are going wrong in our systems at the moment, the climate crisis, and many other crises are born of this deep disconnection we have from nature, this kind of arrogance of the human states, that means that we think we can resolve everything with machines and with technology. 

And we work with a very, very short timeframe, we don't acknowledge that the air I breathe in is the air that that tree has just breathed out, we don't acknowledge our interdependence and the way that we design things is for eternal growth, always driven by growth is going to end in disaster. So if we can reconnect through the fibres of our body and through the senses, that our delicate senses that are, and now I'm burbling. If we can reconnect through our senses, to the way that life actually works, we'll design things that last better, are more sustainable, more nourishing for us and do not destroy the very body that we depend on, the body of the earth. 

So I think it's pretty foundational to all of the changes that need to be made around now. I always make sure when I walk into a meeting, that I sit in the chair that's facing out of a window, so that I can see a tree because it really keeps me grounded, and I can let my attention wander out there and kind of regain perspective when I need it. I like to watch how everything is always moving slightly and subtly in the plant world and that stops me from getting stuck. And if I really want to get a change of state, or to get rid of a difficult emotion, or to open up my thinking, then I'll go out into nature, I'll go into the bush, I'll plunge into the sea and I can absolutely rely on the fact that things will change for me out there, and I'll get ideas. 

There's one tree not very far from me that I visited quite a lot during lockdown. And it's a beautiful sloping, inviting tree that lets me make my way up its trunk and then settle. And in times when I felt a lot of grief, I literally felt held by it, and grounded and I felt this immense gratitude for its very steady presence. It was just a comfort more than I could have reliably found in any human. 

And I also went there when I wasn't unhappy. I went there for other reasons and sometimes just sitting and watching the world that I could see from there, whole new ideas would occur to me. There was one day recently when I was looking with some distress at the tree opposite that appeared to be dying, all the leaves had browned and it's a native tree and I got spinning off into that place of some despair for climate change and plants that were evolved for this landscape unable to survive this year's drought and what that might mean for us. And then my eyes just scroll down the trunk a little bit and I suddenly saw there were little baby leaves popping out not on branches where they normally grow but straight from the trunk and I realised that this tree was kind of drawing its resources and it was letting the leaves at the top and at the tips where the wind blows drop off, but it still had energy and it was sprouting something new closer to the roots. And it made me think about how I have also done that. There's been times where I've had to pull my energy in and then new things have sprouted from much more core parts of myself. So that's just an example of how sometimes when I go out into the bush or into nature, the way that things work out there can nourish and stimulate me every day. 

I don't like to think of nature wanting to connect with me, I feel that this is a massive web of species, each going about their lives more or less, obviously, sentience. Each intermingling with other species, more or less, obviously. And I don't think that there's any special effort to speak to humans. But there's a great deal of communication and interdependence going on out there and to observe that is very, very fascinating. But if you wanted to talk about communication, I guess, this morning, I was picking figs and a bird came so ludicrously close, it was inches from my fingertips, and then it was touching its head this way, that way, was definitely taking me in and I couldn't resist, stopping and pause, cross paths with another species of, you know, a bird that comes close, or most amazingly, swimming with whales and our eyes meet. There's a really deep sense of a sentient creature meeting another sentient creature and it always feels incredibly important and bizarrely exciting and special when it happens. And that's wordless. But it has a very touching quality. 

I don't think that there are messages, you know that anybody's trying to transmit a message to anybody else. That's not how I see it. But I think in that acknowledgement of the livingness, the beingness, the intelligence of other creatures, we, we reconnect, and we remember a lot and it feels very rich and comforting and exciting. I look at trees, and they have bizarre shapes and I always recognize those shapes, you know, there's a very basic branching shape that would produce perfectly regular trees, if there wasn't life, doing what it does to us all. And so when I see the weird twists and asymmetries of trees, I kind of feel the life that they've been through and I feel the wisdom of something that has survived that long and continued that long. And very often, because of that kind of observing. I feel that there is comfort and instruction on how to survive. There. It's not the same as kind of conversation in the way that you would like it. But I can't say that in my own language. I mean, I do say things to the tree that I visit, I thank it when I have had a lovely time sitting with it. I mean, I quite often put out a hand and stroke my fig tree, which is this smooth, beautiful giving tree that lets me climb up it and raid its fruit, and is just always so beautiful and gives so much pleasure to step outside my window. So I engage with them as living beings, for sure and I think they deserve my respect, acknowledgement. 

I think acknowledgement is really important to kind of, to say hello to something that's familiar to, because I will notice what has changed or what has happened to a tree in a storm or whatever, I will acknowledge its experience and I guess that's a form of communication or talking to the truth. But it's not an outward conversation like a good ol' chit chat with a human, it doesn't work like that for me. 

It's a terrible thing to say but I mind more about the plants than the people. They feel more primary to me and I feel more upset to think about the loss of the forests and the greenery and this beautiful biodiversity than to think about waves of human suffering that will come before they are gone. And I feel, I feel a lot of grief when I look out and see near me, a whole bay of trees that are native to this land turning brown and no longer able to survive in the very climate they evolved in, they're native to here. And I feel a sort of doom, a real doom. I felt this incredible Doom when the yellow smoke of the Australian bushfires was so huge that it made its way here and was visible and smellable here, that felt like the scale of the damage coming into my senses and really, it frightens me. And I think it's important to feel that and acknowledge it. Because if we turn away from that grief and ignore it, then we can't even begin to metabolise it. And we cannot begin to acknowledge our care and choose to do something about it. 

So I think it's actually really important that these feelings of sadness or dread come into our conversation, so that we can acknowledge that we care and that it can't go on. It's just so huge, traumatic, and it's easier to push it away than it is to address it. So I think they're important feelings to acknowledge although they're excruciatingly uncomfortable. I see heaps of hope and possibility when I plant seedlings or look in my garden, because the plant world is just incredible. If you drop a seed in a bit of soil, it will give you all it's got to grow. And we actually only need to take away the stressors and nature regenerates itself. All we've got to do is stop stressing it, as with almost everything and the healing happens for itself. The life force is so strong, and it's so joyous and it's so abundant, that in truth I think this is a capable, the system is something in truth, I think this living world is more than able to regenerate itself.