In this connection between inner and outer worlds Frankl was witnessing the workings of nature in their purest form. The word ‘nature’ has two opposite meanings. On the one hand, ‘nature’ is the external, material world, which you can touch and smell and walk in at the weekend; doctors say that it is good for you. But on the other, ‘nature’ denotes the way you are inside, the innermost essence of every person, animal and rock, an essence that is not necessarily material. ‘It is her nature,’ you say, proud of a friend who is generous with her time and money; while astronomers and theologians investigate the ‘nature’ of stars and gods.
Which makes the idea of ‘going into nature’ problematic. We believe that ‘going into nature’ is a matter of going outside, of taking a walk in the fields and woods; or, even worse, that the real point of ‘going into nature’ is ‘to meet ourselves’, that an encounter with nature is a journey of personal discovery (thereby making of nature just another tool from the therapeutic toolkit, alongside shiatsu, moxibustion and aromatherapy). The first view denies the dignity of our soul, the second the dignity of our world. We get closer to a sense of wonder when we understand how intimately connected our soul and the world are.
When you are in a forest, you are part of the forest, as much as the trees and the deer and the mushrooms. You are not in nature, you are with nature, you are nature yourself. Nature is a misty place where soul and world, inside and outside, meet, and become one, with no barriers left between them. The language of magic describes it as well as the language of science. But we have been talking far too much. When we shut up and start listening to nature’s own voice, we will find the path to our fourth key.
After studying with magicians, witches and scientists, our next step is to learn how to listen not to humans but to other voices from the natural world, and learn lessons from them.
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Nature is supposed to fill you with wonder. But does it? Does it really? The starry sky, the boundless sea, the full moon over a field on a sweet summer’s night – are these things marvellous to you? Travel guides, Sunday colour supplements and National Park websites urge us to plunge headlong into nature. Once you are in the woods, contemplating a carpet of bluebells, you will, surely, gorge on wonder. But then you go into the woods, and all you find there is mud and nettles, and the bluebells are, well, all right, kind of, but they are only flowers, after all, and you can’t wait for the walk to be over and the pub to be in sight. Those mystical communions, those numinous experiences, are nowhere to be found. You might feel guilty about that; you might worry that there is something wrong with you. Or maybe you are just not the nature type?
There is nothing wrong with you, and you definitely are the nature type, because you are a creature of flesh and blood, and as such you are nature. The problem lies elsewhere. The notion that all you have to do is step outside and the world will acquire a magic light again is just another example of our culture’s obsession with quick fixes – a pill to ease the pain, a spray of Roundup to kill the weeds in the garden, a get-rich-quick scheme. We have been wrecking our relationship with the wild for several centuries now, and we cannot fix it by booking a B&B or taking a Sunday stroll.
Back in the days when wonder came easily to me, it came even more easily when I was in nature. I remember one experience very clearly. I was eleven, and camping in some deep woods in Basilicata, a region of southern Italy even more rural than Puglia, with the Boy Scouts. I had been tasked with organizing the activities for the day, and I had decided on a simple game. I hid in the woods, leaving some clues behind, and the other Scouts had to find me. It was a glorified game of hide-and-seek.
Nobody found me. This was not because I was a master of camouflage, but because nobody could give a stuff about the game. As I discovered when I eventually wandered back to the campsite several hours later, the others had been messing around, having fun in the woods, playing other games, picking wild strawberries and not bothering to look for me.
That gave me a lot of time to spend in the spot I had chosen as my hiding place, four or five hours with nothing to do. It was a secluded spot just off a path, with a fallen trunk covered in soft moss, on which I sat. The canopy was thick, and it filtered the harsh sunlight of the southern summer. By the time the light reached the brown bark of the forest floor, it was still bright and warming, but less intensely so.
The first hour or so was nice, then it got better. For no external reason that I could discern, I felt a rising excitement, not dissimilar from what I would feel years later when I got lost with Paola in Hampshire. The excitement kept rising and rising, until it peaked, and I remember, as if it was yesterday, that I was hit by the certainty that everything, everything in this world, was beautiful and sacred. I felt I had to act in accordance with that feeling and I did it the only way I knew then: I fell on my knees and prayed. My inner life and the natural world were in close communion.
I am very far from being a Catholic these days, and I find the idea of falling on my knees for anything or anybody rather repulsive. But I was raised in a culture that considered the resurrection of Jesus to be a historical event, and heaven and hell hard facts of life. Back then, Catholicism was all that I had to explain to myself the numinous feeling that had overcome me, and I made do with it. I was the same boy who read science fiction for hours on end, who found time to read The Lord of the Rings twice, and who joined a stargazing club. I was not jaded yet, not by human life, not by the natural world.
To find wonder in nature will require changes deeper than those offered by an occasional walk. Throughout our life we have taken our relationship with nature for granted, always asking, never giving back, and when you take a relationship for granted, you ruin it. To get a second chance we must understand what we did wrong, and how to apologize.
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Nonno Arcangelo, my paternal grandfather, was a dedicated listener to the natural world. He was a peasant who could read and write, just about. A well-respected mastro innestatore, ‘master grafter’, he spent his life working in southern vineyards, where the heat, the colours, the scents have a particular intensity. His son, my father, was a civil servant, the first professional in his family, very proud of what he had achieved, and also very proud of his heritage. He had been working in the fields since he was a boy and continued to do so throughout his university years. He had time to learn from Nonno Arcangelo. My father could tend fruit trees in such a way that come summer they would be overflowing with apricots and peaches, he could gather wild herbs, he could hunt and fish (though he was lousy at both). I showed an interest in nature that my brothers never had, and when I was little he had started to teach me the basics, taking me into the garden with him, wringing chicken’s necks with me. But he developed early-onset Alzheimer’s, and died young, and peasant skills were one of the things he did not have a chance to hand down.
There is a fundamental difference between my father and me. He was of the first generation of our family who knew more than the previous one, and I was of the first who knew less. He knew how to live with nature and also how to negotiate the modern world; I knew only the latter. A combination of historical change and personal bad luck severed an ancestral connection with the land that had lasted for millennia. This combination is quite typical of the last century or so.