nature or nurture?
All my life, in science classes and books, I’ve read the question, “are things the way they are due to nature or nurture?”
All my life I’ve known, it is nurture.
To be precise, it is mostly nurture, with a little nature mixed in. On planet earth, nothing is ever all one thing or another, it’s always a mix.
And, since nature is the one, that, by definition, is out of our purview; attributing too much to nature has always seemed like a cop-out to me.
Over the weekend we were with a lot of old friends at a very happy wedding. One of them told us how they adopted a rescue beagle and already had a labrador. When we asked if the beagle howled, they said, “actually, surprisingly, no.”
They were expecting howls from said beagle, but instead, it learned to bark in the same way as his new best friend the labrador, and hardly ever howls.
It is in a beagle’s nature to “howl” (although we could argue that breeding is a form of nurturance), but he was nurtured into a labrador’s short, protective bark.
His natural ability to howl hasn’t been unlocked the way it would have been had he been adopted into a family of beagles.
The howling would be incessant.
Have you ever met an evil baby?
I haven’t.
I’ve met babies that were hungry, tired or needed to be changed, fed, held or soothed; essentially, nurtured.
I’ve never met a baby with a vendetta.
I’ve never met a baby who would cancel USAID.
No matter the “innate” nature of the baby, there would have to be a real dearth of nurturing for it to grow up and do a thing like that - to other babies.
Imagine two apples, the same type, maybe even from the same tree.
Their nature is evident.
Now imagine I take one apple and smash it with a bat.
And the other apple I wash and shine up with a soft cloth.
What affected the state of the apples the most? That they both started as apples? Or does their current state have something to do with the hammer?
I hypothesize we as a collective are in a nurturing* shortage.
Our culture has not been nurturing.
The history we are living through is like the hammer.
Those of us who are able to nurture have had our thumb in the dam since 2020.
What happens to our nature when we are not nurtured properly? What happens to our nature when it gets smashed by a hammer?
Which brings us to the fucking pandemic and everything that has happened since then.
Out of the blue, my partner – Dan – said to me the other day (the day before I learned about the beagle who barks like a labrador) that “wow, they really were successful at isolating us” – referring to the isolation process that started in earnest during the pandemic and a trend that seems to be ever expanding.
All the kids, teens and early-mid-twenties folks we know have a developmental social gap - a tear in their social fabric exactly where they were age-wise where the pandemic happened.
A gap many of us are trying to repair, heal, mend; nurturing the pieces back into wholeness.
GENTLE CONTEMPLATIONS:
How was our ability to nurture affected by the pandemic?
How nurtured have we been since the pandemic?
How nurtured are you today, in this moment? Are there any inspired moves you could make with that information?
How nurturing or nurtured are we able to be at this point in history?
I want to defend our ability and our proclivity to nurture.
I want us to get some circular nurturing going – not only relationally, physically, but also nurturing our hope, vision and dreams.
I want us to nurture each other and nurture our common life – together, nurturing the one world we share.
The truth is, nurturing others feels good. Just like making art, reading and gardening do.
Being nurtured also generally feels good.
By some grace, nurturing can become infinite when made circular and cycling between beings and landscapes.
Nature is what it is. That is the hand you are dealt.
Nurture is where we have agency. These are cards you can play.
What ever a thing’s nature is, can be improved (or degraded) by the level of nurturance.
This weekend’s full moon would make a great moment to dial up the nurturing. This particular lunation has an fresh energy of illumination and expansion - and there is a very beautiful video experience in the Lunar Library for this full moon that holds a lot of magic. If you are in there, be sure not to miss it.
Until next time,
Jess
p.s. This will be the general format for weekly posts through the summer - the first bit will be on Substack, but you’ll have to click through to my site (youaremagicla.com - where you are right now!) for the whole thing.
* a word from an internalizer – I am moved to mention that the topic I am bringing up is the power of nurture… notice how you took that. did you think about how you could better nurture yourself? did you think about nurturing someone else - a person, a pet, the land? Center again “the power of nurture” in your awareness, and see what comes up and regard this information as divinatory, exploring from both a giving and receiving angle.
“Culture is not your friend”
- Terrence McKenna
“90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise.”
- Joe Lim
"Somehow, the changing of consciousness is deemed to be threatening to the state. Now, why is that? Is the state somehow playing a shell game, that would be exposed, if people were to actually open their eyes? In what way does the expansion of consciousness threaten industrial democracies? I believe we need real answers to this."
- Terence McKenna
“The way to keep the digital world sane is to draw from outside of it.”
- Charles Eisenstein
“Someone else's vision will never be as good as your own vision of your self. Live and die with it because in the end it’s all you have. Lose it and you lose yourself and everything else. I should have listened more to myself.”
-Georgia O'Keeffe
“Some men give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal, while others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than ever before.”
- Herodotus
“Certain things are easier for me to tell than others. I usually know when a song is done in terms of written, I just hear an inner bell clang.”
- Joanna Newsom
“One problem with fascism, I now realize, is that it combines entertainment and politics in a way that actually is kind of compelling or even repulsively riveting. Just as there is a usually unacknowledged pleasure in doing evil (which we should speak about more), it turns out there is also a subliminal thrill in watching people do evil—observing them from afar as they plot, scheme, lie, steal, and manipulate.”
- Daniel Pinchbeck
“We must question popular demands rather than just passively reproducing them and consider the operating logic from which they emerge.
Everything under the sun is not quantifiable, measurable, knowable even - the idea it should be is colonial logic or in Edourd Glissants terms “transparency”
Why do so many of us long to be legible/knowable/ transparent under the logic of white supremacy. It’s crucial that we have an understanding of the importance of not always being seen and the power of invisibility. I think it’s essential that we claim for ourselves the right to #opacity. We don’t always need to be categorised, knowable + seen by authoritarian and hegemonic structures. Think about the tensions between “transparency” and #opacity in your life / identity / position… “
- Emma Dabiri
A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
- Maya Angelou
“Gaia has no church because she doesn’t need one. Nor is there a need for any ritual other than high-focus care for a plant, wild animal, the bees or any form of nature within your orb. Heirloom seeds are more valuable than hymns.”
- Mystic Medusa