Reflections by Michael Overstreet
Have you ever stopped to ponder what nature is? When we say that we love being out in nature, does this mean that it is something distinct from us? The word “environment” would have us think that nature is what surrounds or environs us—but does this then mean that we are at its center? We have a tendency to believe that we are separate from the wilderness beyond our doors, and it is fundamental to the ways we inhabit our planet. This tendency to think of the national parks and nature reserves as being disparate from our homes is so fundamental to the experience of the modern world that it’s in our very grammar. How, indeed, does the way we conceive of being out in nature shape how we relate to it?
These were some of the questions that professor of eco-psychology and scholar-practitioner of philosophy and religion Adam Lobel brought to the Contemplative Sciences Center Research Salon on the subject of “nature” on March 19, 2026. He began our session by honoring the Monacan people, who stewarded the land on which we live before Europeans settled in what is now Charlottesville. Adam elaborated on this acknowledgment by saying that, while recognizing the Indigenous people before us is an important political act, we should not forego paying tribute to the common ground that relates us to those who came before. And so, he asked us to take a quiet moment to acknowledge this idea: that the Salon we found ourselves in connected us physically to other worlds.
In bidding that we allow our senses and cognition to expand beyond ourselves, Adam asked us to come into contact with the objects of the world that held us. The trees outside the windowpanes wavered in the late afternoon sun in a breeze we could not hear. No longer filled with speech, the beautiful sunlit space of the Contemplative Commons was silent as we began to ponder the wood and metal building in which we sat. It’s no wonder, spending so much of our days inside enclosing structures, that we often come to think the land and trees are incidental to our busy lives. And yet, when we allow ourselves to ponder, we may come to realize that our walls, ceilings, and floors are of the same material nature of these trees and land. The process of contemplative inquiry offers, for Adam, a way of challenging the two sides of the coin—human and nature.
Adam took us back to a foundational moment in his life, a point at which this apparent duality began to dissolve into something more holistic. He told us a story from a week-long retreat in the Northern Sierra mountains of California. Buddhist teachers and Indigenous healers gathered to discuss what their spiritual practices shared in common. While the wisdom and epistemologies of these heritages differ, they come together in a belief system that could be described as land-based and animistic, where the spiritual and material worlds are impossible to disentangle. Adam told us of accompanying an Indigenous elder to the peak of Big Springs Mountain, where an underground body of water sprung as though infinite up through the earth. On reaching the mouth of the mountain stream, the elder healer laid cornmeal next to the ebbing pool. Whenever the natural world greets her, she told Adam, she makes an offering of food to greet it in turn. Describing the way she gazed upon the water spilling from its source, Adam related how her eyes softened, her skin seemed to open as if emerging from some cocoon. She began to speak to the spring, and the gurgling of the water mixed with her voice. Soon, it was as though she began to speak as the water, or perhaps the water spoke through her. Drinking from the spring afterwards, Adam said it was the first time he was able to grasp the breadth of the Lakota phrase of political resistance: Mní wičhóni—“water is life.”
What cultural shifts might occur if each time we take a drink of water we stop to think about what we were consuming? Is the water we drink from our kitchen tap different from the bodies of water in the natural world? And are either of these actually distinct from the blood that fills our veins? Adam discussed how the “natural” has been described using similar terms in three different cultural worlds he has studied. Physis, from the Greek, means “that which emerges from itself”; Ziran, from the Chinese, means “so of itself, spontaneous”; and Rangjung, from the Tibetan, means “spontaneously arisen.” Like a creek that comes from a deep mountain spring or a litter of acorns from a towering oak tree, this triangulation of terms lets us see how nature can be seen as that which is both part of and separate from something that came before it.
And so, when we say that we enjoy being “out in” nature, perhaps this double preposition isn’t so far-fetched. For it’s when we take pause to step outside of the ordinary senses we have of our language, selves, and homes that we might come to realize how much we and nature are both within and part of a more expansive kind of home.