Nature Speaks

The evening table is set simply – bread, fruit, a clay jug of water catching the light. Around it gather Milton Erickson, Carl Jung, Mary Oliver, and Iain McGilchrist. Outside, a garden waits in twilight, crickets beginning their slow percussion.

Erickson breaks the silence first, his tone gentle but precise:

“People come to me seeking methods, techniques. Yet the real work is not in handing them a formula, but in returning them to their own resources – the inner wellspring that already knows how to rest. A person overwhelmed by screens does not need more instructions. They need a reminder that the body remembers stillness, just as the earth does.”

Jung leans forward, his eyes reflective.

“Yes, Milton. The modern person has lost contact with symbols – with the deep images that root us. The screen fragments attention; it multiplies surfaces but offers no depth. What they crave is not another program but meaning. And meaning, as I have found, arises in dialogue with the natural world – in dreams, in rivers, in stones. To stand by water is already to enter therapy.”

Mary Oliver smiles quietly, her hands folded on the table.

“I think of it more simply. When I walked the woods, I was not searching for meaning, but for presence. For astonishment. To watch a heron lift from the reeds – that was enough. People today are starved not of methods, but of wonder. Screens have a way of teaching us to consume. But wonder cannot be consumed; it must be received.”

“My work,” she murmurs again, “is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”

McGilchrist nods, slowly.

“Our crisis is one of attention. Screens train the left hemisphere – the analytic, the grasping – to dominate. But the right hemisphere, the one that perceives context, relationship, wholeness, is diminished. If we are to help, we must invite a shift of attention. Not a rejection of technology, but a rebalancing. To attend again to the slow intelligence of the world – to a stream, to a birdcall, to the play of light – is to re-inhabit the fullness of mind.”

The conversation falls into a companionable silence. Outside, the garden deepens, and the clay jug on the table glimmers as if it too were listening.

It is not a program that emerges from this gathering, but a shared intuition: that what people need is not another formula, but a practice of noticing. Not a discipline imposed from above, but a remembering of what the wild within us still knows – how to pause, how to belong, how to listen.

As the evening closes, Jung lifts his glass.

“To bridges,” he says.

“Between worlds,” Erickson adds.

Mary Oliver looks toward the darkening trees.

“And to wonder.”

McGilchrist finishes softly:

“To attention, the shape of the world we choose.”

The wild remembers. So do you.